Earlier this month I got a letter from a Harvard grad, class of 1959, who had seen a copy of my history of squash book. He mentioned Corey Wynn, his freshman coach.
Corey was also Barnaby’s assistant and the freshman tennis coach at Harvard for decades, as well as the assistant coach in squash and tennis at Radcliffe in the 1970s. In 1968 he went up to Vermont and helped launch Windridge, a new tennis camp founded by Dartmouth squash coach Red Hoehn’s son Ted. Wynn had his one moment in the sun: he coached the women’s tennis varsity at Harvard/Radcliffe in 1976-77, leading them to a 10-7 record.
My friend said that he had first learned of squash while at Belmont Hill School, which had one lonely court with no coach or team; an English teacher had briefly taught him the game. Then as a freshman at Harvard he made the team. “Corey was a remarkable coach who actively played with each one of us—rally and rally and rally—only then to demonstrate his next put-away.”
Wynn died in September 2002 at the age of eighty-five. With him passed the era of the freshman coach—and for top schools like Harvard, the era of converting tennis players to squash players.