Prior to this year's men's squash season, conventional wisdom had its greenbacks on Princeton to wrestle the national championship trophy away from Harvard.

The Tigers were returning a number of players from a solid team last year, and looked, at least on paper, to be more than a match for perennial rivals Harvard and Yale.

Sunday afternoon, though, Harvard took a first step towards re-establishing its national pre-eminence and dashing the hopes of the insurgent preppies from the south: The Crimson blew out the Tigers 6-3 in a dual meet at Princeton, claiming the contests' first five matches.

"It was a huge win, just an outstanding effort," co-captain Neal Tew said. "The whole Princeton team and crowd thought that they were going to beat us, but we dominated them. It was real convincing--I don't know if I ever remember it being that convincing."

In a squash match, each team has nine seeded players. Each player plays a player from the other team in a best-of-five game match, with each game going to the first player to garner 15 points.

Winning matches for the Crimson were top-seeded senior Marty Clark (3-0), second-seeded junior Adrian Ezra (3-0), fourth-seeded senior Josh Horwitz (3-1), as well as Tew (3-2), junior David White (3-1) and freshman Mike Oh (3-1).

Dropping matches were freshmen Tal Ben-Shacher and Ted Bruenner (1-3 and 0-3 respectively), and third-seeded junior Jon Karlen, who was forced by an injury to default.