Essentially, the greatness of the Harvard women's squash team is this 96-8.

The Crimson played 11 matches over the course of the season. Each match is made up of nine games. That's 99 games Of those 99, Harvard lost just three and finished the season with a 969 winning percentage.

Top to bottom, no team in the country could compete with Harvard. In fact, only three individuals could.

"It's too had that we didn't have more teams to push us to our limits," Coach Bill Doyle said after Harvard flattened Yale, 9-0, for the regular-season national championship.

Harvard also won the Howe Cup for the first time in three years. The Howe Cup tournament invites every varsity women's squash program in the nation to compete, and most do. It's a test of team depth and endurance, and the Crimson won it with its second-best player out with the flu.

And, in the post-season national individual tournament, five out of the top 10 players hailed from Harvard--including the winner, junior Vanya Desai.

The women's squash team was good enough to start tongues wagging about it being "the best ever." And while team members are predictably shy over grabbing such an accolade, they don't hesitate to acknowledge that, indeed, it was a superior year.

"This year was one of the best teams we've ever had," says junior Jordanna Fraiberg, who won the national individual tournament in 1992. "I'm not sure if we're the best, but we're certainly among the best."

Teams of the Year don't have to dominate their sport the way the women's squash team did. But it helps.

Harvard's top-to-bottom quality can't be fully realized by just looking at its matches. If it was a dream season, it wasn't an easy one.

A flu epidemic hit the team in mid-season, knocking Fraiberg out of the Howe Cup. Injuries slowed training schedules. Desai, the team's top player, developed tendonitis in her wrist.

But buoyed by the team's exceptional depth ("we could go 11 deep and still be very tough," Doyle says), the team persevered.

"I've never seen so much sickness in one year before," Doyle observes. "But everyone rose above it. They refused to lose."

The Rookie

Although several freshmen contributed a lot to the season, the most surprising rookie on the team might have been Doyle himself.

Two years ago, Doyle was selling real estate part-time in Greenwich, Connecticut. A 1985 Trinity College graduate who played on the professional circuit for four years, Doyle had no coaching experience when he stepped into the retiring Steve Piltch's shoes.

"Coaching was always on my horizon," Doyle says. "But I wanted a school with students who are focused on squash. And no school had a better squash tradition than Harvard."

Harvard had so much talent, Mr. Ed might have been able to take this team to the national championship. But Doyle took them a step further, teaching and conditioning his team to fulfill its maximum potential.

"The matches kind of got in the way this year," Doyle says. "These were smart, driven, understanding people who knew what it takes to excel. It was most challenging to have the surplus of talent we had and to try and keep everybody focused."

Doyle--who coaches the men's team as well as the women's--also won the respect of his players with his knowledge and work ethic.

"He's just a great coach, an excellent coach," Fraiberg says. "He's got a lot of experience, and he has a good way of articulating things. He knows his stuff well, and he kept us working hard.

The Future

Defending national championships is an extremely difficult task in collegiate sports. A particularly good team is hurt on the recruiting front, as many top-line players opt for other schools where they will be bigger names.

And, while Harvard has soared this season, other traditional squash powers have floundered.

"We were really strong this year, while other teams were kind of down," Doyle said after his team's Howe Cup victory. "We knew that if we stayed healthy and worked hard, we'd be tough to beat."

The formula will not be as simple next year. Doyle says that recruiting the top high school players hasn't been easy ("many say that Harvard is just too good for them," Doyle says) and schools like Princeton, Yale and Trinity will rebound from their weak seasons.

"Next year, it will be much more of a relative thing," Fraiberg says.

But for now, next year doesn't matter. This is now: 96-3.