ITHACA, N.Y. —  After making significant gains last season, the Cornell squash programs will try to continue its march up the national rankings when the 2012-13 season gets under way this weekend at the Cornell Round Robin, staged at Belkin International Squash Courts.
 
The men's team will be looking for a reprieve of a 2011-12 season which saw the squad's first Potter Cup quarterfinal victory in program history. But due to some significant losses to graduation, plenty of new faces will have a chance to play in bigger roles.
 
Gone are two of the Big Red's top three — All-Ivy League and All-America selections Thomas Spettigue and Alexander Domenick — as well as regular contributors Will Hartigan and Rishi Jalan. Freshmen Abhijit Malik, Graham Dietz and Karan Kankariya all figure to contribute, but are likely to be slotted toward the bottom of the order.
 
That means the Big Red will be pushing many of its returning letterwinners up multiple spots in the lineup behind senior Nick Sachvie, who returns for his third season as the team's consistent No. 1 while also serving as a co-captain alongside Owen Butler.
 
Butler had a team-high 17 victories last season opposite just three defeats, but he will be bumped up for the lower third. Other returning competitors include senior Arjun Gupta, junior Bryan Keating and sophomores Aditya Jagtap and Ryan Todd.
 
“So it's really up to the new guys to kind of hold down the end of the lineup,” said ninth-year head coach Mark Devoy. “It will be a steep learning curve for them. It's a little bit of a challenge, but that's also all the fun in this.”
 
The women's team is also coming off a year marked by improvement, when it moved up from seventh to sixth in the country after a dramatic 5-4 victory over Stanford during the Howe Cup last February.
 
To end last season on such a high note sets in place a sense of optimism moving forward, especially considering only two members of the 2011-12 squad were lost to graduation.
 
“We have a lot of talent, new and old, so it will be extremely competitive in-house vying for a position on the 10-person travel squad,” said Julee Devoy, who will enter her ninth season as head coach. “The girls will be working hard over the next couple of months with highly motivated senior captains Jaime Laird and Maggie Remsen wanting to realize their team potential and attain their season goals — to fend off #7 Stanford and #8 Dartmouth and to challenge top-five teams like Princeton and Trinity, believing that winning is possible.”
 
Winning is more than just possible with sophomore Danielle Letourneau holding down the No. 1 spot after a successful debut campaign that included a nationally ranking of No. 9, a first-team All-America selection and an All-Ivy League.
 
Laird, Remsen, junior Jessenia Pacheco and Rachel Au also return, giving the Big Red all of its top half of the lineup back. Freshman Abbey Foster is also expected to land somewhere in that region of the order, while fellow newcomers Brynn Daniels, Reut Odinak and Olivia Wherry will also compete for consistent appearances.
 
This weekend's event will span three days. The men's team will open the season at 5 p.m. Friday against Western Ontario, then both the men's and women's teams will compete in a pair of matches Saturday. The Big Red will take on Williams at 10 a.m., then Hamilton at 7 p.m. Play wraps up Sunday when the Big Red clashes with Stanford at 11 a.m.