Last month Coach Paul Assaiante retired after a forty-nine year journey in the squash world. He and I sat down for an Outside The Glass interview, which went up a few days later:
Episode eighty-nine was not the first time he was on OTG. We did an interview, at the U.S. Open at Drexel, that went up nearly three years ago:
And so the record-breaking run is over. His record at Trinity was 511-34 (a .937 winning percentage), giving him an overall career record (along with his eleven years at Army and two at Williams) of 622-98. There is a slight discrepancy with Trinity’s records—they list his Bantam record at 507-29. This stems from his first three years at Trinity when the sports information department didn’t count Trinity’s results at the national intercollegiate team championships, the new playoff system that had come into existence only a few years earlier.
Some of Coach’s records will be broken. He and Jack Barnaby coached seventeen teams to a national title—Mike Way already has fourteen. Someone could possibly win 253 consecutive dual matches. But will any coach accumulate 622 collegiate wins again? That number seems imperishable.