WITH THE RAIN falling outside the Arrillaga Center, it was the kind of day that made Seattle native Elena Wagenmans feel right at home. Inside, it was just like old times.
Elena and her brother, Yos, don't get to play squash together very often, not since she arrived at Stanford last fall. But, with Yos visiting, it was a rare opportunity to do so, in the few minutes before the Stanford team began practice in earnest.
For Wagenmans, squash is supremely a family game. It had to be to make it work in Seattle, a continent away from the nation's hotbeds of the sport, and the place where Elena developed the talent to make her known in two continents.
Wagenmans learned the game from her father and gained experience mostly by playing against her brother. Such were the challenges of finding opponents, especially female, in Seattle that she often played against men.
After one Elena victory, her opponent, a man of about 35, accused her of cheating during a long-winded sour-grapes tirade. Elena was 10.
Yos has this assessment of his sister's game: "Unfair."
Wagenmans was a prodigy then and is a collegiate star now. The freshman plays No. 1 on a Stanford team that holds, at No. 4, the highest ranking in program history.
"She could potentially win the intercollegiates," Stanford coach Mark Talbott said. "She's that talented."
Talbott considers Wagenmans, who is 5-foot-11, among the top five or six players in collegiate squash right now. No Stanford player has advanced beyond the quarterfinals of the Ramsay Cup, or finished with a higher national ranking than Pamela Chua's No. 11 in 2013. Wagenmans could, sooner or later, improve on both.
Since Talbott, the 15-time top-ranked player on the North American professional tour and known as "the Michael Jordan of squash," became the Stanford program director in 2004, the Cardinal has been rising in stature.
Last year, Stanford matched its highest finish at the Howe Cup national championship tournament by placing sixth. Then, it landed Wagenmans, whom Talbott called, "the No. 1 recruit in the world."
That's not hyperbole. Many schools recruit from around the world. Defending champ and No. 1 Harvard has seven foreigners on its 13-player roster. No. 3 Trinity has 11.
There remains a significant gap between the nation's top-tier teams – Harvard, Princeton, and Trinity – and the rest. But Stanford, as illustrated by a 7-2 victory over fellow No. 4 Yale last month, is chipping away at the traditional powers, despite offering no scholarships and being the only program west of St. Louis.
Her father, Wibe, is Dutch and met Elena's mother, Noriko, while studying in her native Tokyo. Elena was born in Belgium, and lived in Finland, before Wibe's work in the tech industry brought the family to the U.S. Three languages are spoken in the Wagenmans' Seattle home. Elena speaks to her father in Dutch, to her mother in Japanese, and her brother in English.
A Sunday winter family tradition was a day of skiing followed by a game of squash. By playing men, Elena learned to play fast and develop a power game to match their style. She also learned to play in front of her opponent by mastering the volley.
Each year, Elena visited her grandparents in Gorssel, a village about 60 miles east of Amsterdam and played in European events, catching the eye of Dutch coaches. She won the Dutch under-19 title at age 13 and soon was playing for the Dutch senior national team, as an eighth-grader.
Wagenmans now loves playing in a team environment, and even embraces the cutthroat ladder matches every other week that determine the order of the team's lineup. Wagenmans unseated junior Casey Wong at No. 1. Now, they form a formidable 1-2 punch heading into the Howe Cup on Feb. 22-24 in Hartford, Connecticut.
Wagenmans was attracted to Stanford by its' engineering programs – she anticipates majoring in symbolic systems – as much as squash. But it's squash that she truly enjoys, rain or shine.
Elena and Yos Wagenmans.