Yale Athletics

This year’s seniors on the men’s squash team — Maxwell Orr ’25, Max Forster ’25, Nikhil Ismail ’25, Taylor Clayton ’25 and Merritt Wurts ’25.5, who has finished his NCAA eligibility — is the program’s largest graduating class. In their first collegiate matches, against the University of Virginia, Orr aced his opponent, 3-0, and Wurts won his match 3-1. Against Western University, Ismail and Clayton defeated their opponents, leading to a 9-0 team sweep. Forester secured his first victory against Brown.

Their sophomore season, Forster, Wurts and Clayton were key to an opening victory over UVA. With Ismail and Wurts coming in clutch, Yale overcame an earlier loss to Penn at the 2023 College Squash Association Team Championships, taking down the Quakers 5-4. At the CSA Doubles Championships, the duo of Wurts and Clayton triumphed over St. Lawrence, 3-0; Middlebury, 3-1 and Brown, 3-0. The impressive run ended with a loss to the Naval Academy in the doubles semifinals.

In the 2023-24 campaign, the class of 2025 persevered, winning their first four matches. They entered their final season determined. They defeated Trinity, 7-2, in the regular season, and overpowered Princeton in the CSA semifinals. The team then faced the defending champion Penn Quakers in the finals.

“While we fell short of a championship, we can confidently look back on the year without regrets,” captain Orr wrote to the News. “It was clear to me that the sentiment of the team, and especially the seniors, was that we were more disappointed that our time competing together was over than the fact that we had lost.” The Bulldogs’ second-place finish marked their best result in nearly a decade — since their 2016 title.