After becoming the first Cornell competitor to reach the finals of the College Squash Association Individual Championships, junior Nick Sachvie headlines an impressive list of returning players for the Big Red men's squash team coming into the 2011-12 season.
 
Cornell kicks off the new campaign against Middlebury and Williams at the Williams Round Robin tournament in northwestern Massachusetts. The Big Red then returns home after the Thanksgiving holiday for three matches before the intersession break. Among those matches is the squad's Ivy League opener against Columbia.
 
The Big Red finished sixth at the Potter Cup last season, having lost to the University of Rochester before taking down Franklin & Marshall, 7-2, and dropping a narrow 5-4 affair against host Harvard in the fifth-place match. The table is set for a long run this season, as Sachvie (2), senior Alex Domenick (26), junior Rishi Jalan (41), junior Arjun Gupta (56) and senior Dave Hilton (70) are all Top 100-ranked players returning to compete for the Big Red this season.
 
Aditya Jagtap highlights the five-man freshman class. At 16, he became the youngest player to ever serve as captain of India's national junior team, playing No. 2 for the fourth-place team at the 2008 World Junior Championships in Switzerland. He also played in the No. 1 position in both the Under-17 and Under-19 age groups, once again playing in the 2010 World Juniors.
 
Senior Will Hartigan returns to the team after a year off, supplementing the middle of the order after posting a 9-7 record primarily in the top 3 as a sophomore. Freshman Ryan Todd also figures to factor in the middle of the lineup.
 
The schedule has a new twist this season, with Ivy League matches backloading the slate. Cornell has consecutive matches against Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton and Penn over a nine-day stretch concluding on Feb. 12, when the regular season ends with a non-league clash with Hobart.
 
Mark Devoy will be entering his eighth season as head coach of the Big Red, having led the squad to a 69-51 overall record, and a .500 or better mark in each of his first seven seasons at the helm.