Baldwin senior captures gold medal at Pan Am Squash Championships
Baldwin School senior Morgan Steelman recently won the gold medal in mixed doubles and the silver medal in the team competition at the Pan Am Squash Championships in Argentina for Team USA.
Morgan Steelman and Wil Hagen, in mixed doubles for Team USA, upset top-seeded Mexico before defeating Paraguay to win gold in the 2015 Pan American Junior Championships Mixed Doubles competition Sept. 3 in Resistencia, Argentina.
Steelman and Hagen, who were unseeded, twice recovered from losing the first game to win two difficult three-game matches before the final. The Americans first defeated Ecuador 9-11, 11-9, 11-10, then upset top-seeded Mexico 8-11, 11-3, 11-8 to reach the final. Steelman and Hagen only needed two games to claim gold medals against Paraguay in the final, however, cruising to victory 11-4, 11-2.
Steelman said, “Going into the [semifinal] match, we knew that the Mexican pair was very strong and we would need to play our best to have any chance of winning. We lost a close first game and needed to rethink our initial strategy. The number one boy from Mexico was playing on the left hand wall so we needed to shut him down and focus on attacking his partner on the right hand wall. This meant there was a lot of pressure on me, since I was also playing on the right hand wall. I remember feeling like I was rallying down the right hand wall against the Mexican girl for 70 minutes nonstop. When we won the match and came off court, I was exhausted, but what I will never forget was how excited Wil and I were.”
Steelman also was a member of the silver medal-winning U.S. women’s team, which entered the team competition seeded second, and fulfilled their seeding to top a group including Brasil, Guatemala, and Paraguay losing only one match in the group stages.
