PRINCETON, N.J. — For the ninth consecutive season, the women's squash team will make a bid for a national championship at the College Squash Association's Howe Cup. The Big Red enters the event held Friday through Sunday at Jadwin Gymnasium ranked seventh, opening play against second-ranked Penn at noon Friday.
 
Cornell (8-6) enters the championships on a three-match losing streak against three of the top four teams in the nation. Among those matches was a 9-0 loss to the Quakers in the Big Red's regular-season finale on Feb. 12. Senior co-captain Rachel Scherman (No. 2), junior Charlotte Knaggs (No. 7) and freshman Lucy Martin (No. 8) were the only competitors from Cornell to force a fourth set in their respective matches.
 
Junior Margaux Losty leads the team in victories with a 9-3 record from the top third, and classmate Emma Uible is 8-4 while typically competing one spot below Losty on the ladder. Along with Scherman and junior No. 1 Michèle Garceau, Cornell has a combined 24-12 record from the top three positions.
 
The Big Red finished seventh in the Howe Cup — the CSA's 'A' Division national championship — last year after finishing sixth in the four seasons prior. Cornell then started this season ranked eighth by the CSA before recording a 6-3 victory over Columbia on Jan. 29 to leapfrog the Lions back up to seventh.
 
The Big Red is 25-2 all-time against Penn (11-1), which has been ranked second from start to finish through the regular season. Sophomore Reeham Salah (12-0) and junior Melissa Alves (10-0) are undefeated from the top spots in the order. If Cornell can pull off the upset against Penn, it would guarantee the Big Red's best season-ending national standing in program history.
 
One of the Howe Cup's other quarterfinals — top-ranked Harvard vs. No. 8 Columbia — will run simultaneously to the Big Red's opening match on Friday. The other debut matchups, No. 4 Princeton vs. No. 5 Yale and No. 3 Trinity vs. No. 6 Stanford, will follow with start times of 2:30 p.m.
 
The winner of the Cornell-Penn match will then take on the winner of the Trinity-Stanford match at 2:30 p.m. Saturday, while the losers will meet in a consolation semifinal at 11:30 a.m. Saturday. All four placement matches will be staged at Jadwin Gymnasium on Sunday — seventh-place match at 8:30 a.m., fifth-place match at 12:30 p.m., the championship at 2 p.m. and the third-place match at 3 p.m.
 
Cornell has never won a Howe Cup quarterfinal in program history. The Big Red's best finish was in 2001, when it placed fifth following consolation bracket victories over Brown and Dartmouth.
 
The CSA has also announced that SQUASHTV will offer a free broadcast of the team championships. The primary focus will be on the main court, but additional cameras will cover action on some of the other courts. The stream can be found at www.psaworldtour.com/tv