By Michael Bamberger

Fans packed the stands as the Bantams' Singh took on Santiago Imberton of Princeton. Al Tielemans/SI

The players all have nicknames. Their resident computer expert, Neil Robertson (also from Zimbabwe), is Bill Gates. Supreet Singh, a Sikh from India who wears ritual rings and necklaces and bracelets, is Bling. The players sing on road trips, and the coach drives the school van, often with a 44-ounce Big Gulp Diet Coke between his knees. Meal money is $18 per day, and the players sleep three-to-a-room in $100-a-night hotels. Assaiante shares a room with two freshmen. Most of the players have on-campus jobs. Players who can't travel home for winter break wind up at Assaiante's house for Christmas dinner. Squash at Trinity is not a business. It's sport.

Assaiante, who is also the Trinity men's tennis coach, is a nonstop talker who begins a dozen phone conversations a day with, "How are you, my friend?" He's a compulsive person who preaches balance even though he has none in his own life. He talks openly with his players about how his obsession with coaching contributed to the demise of two marriages and other relationships. He talks to them about his eldest son, a recovering heroin addict now in prison for armed robbery. He talks to them about drinking, knowing that they will and wanting them to be sane about it. He sees lessons in everything, especially his own mistakes; his life is as messy as Wooden's is neat. What they both do is teach.

"I love the guy," says the Bantams' best player, Baset Chaudhry, a 22-year-old sophomore from Pakistan who played professionally but is eligible for college squash because he could prove that he spent more in expenses than he earned in prize money. "We play for him." That's the trick for Assaiante: He turns his handpicked international all-stars -- with their different religions and homelands and native languages, a few of them rich, others poor, some in between -- into a team.

The Princeton match got steamy quickly. Two years ago at Trinity, Princeton was one point from ending the Bantams' winning streak when Gustav Detter, a Swede who was then a Trinity freshman, made an epic comeback to beat Tigers senior Yasser El-Halaby of Egypt, who is widely regarded as the best collegiate squash player in history. Detter's 3-2 win cinched a 5-4 Trinity victory, and the next morning he received a standing ovation in Mather Hall, the school's main cafeteria. Princeton had not admitted Detter, but at Trinity he has become fluent in English and has earned excellent grades. Describing his crucial victory against the Tigers, he said, "I wanted to show them they made the wrong decision." He only looks mild-mannered.

This year against Princeton, Detter played Kimlee Wong, a junior from Malaysia. (The Tigers have a lot of foreign talent too.) Just watching the match was exhausting; there were dozens of rallies with 50 or more hits. It was a battle of attrition, and when the sneaker squeaks finally stopped, Detter had won the best-of-five match in three straight games, 9-5, 9-2, 9-1. When all the matches were over, three hours after they had begun, the Bantams had prevailed again, 6-3, dealing Princeton its first loss of the season. Hundreds of students traipsed back up the hill, and alumni in their grosgrain belts and Cole Haan loafers and Trinity baseball caps headed home.

With three more victories last weekend, the Trinity winning streak was up to 179. (UCLA basketball, under Wooden, once won 88 games in a row.) If the Bantams defeat Harvard on Wednesday night, they will have their 10th straight undefeated regular season. All that will remain is the national championships, from Feb. 15 to 17 in Cambridge, Mass. A Trinity-Princeton rematch there is a distinct possibility.

In the final match of the evening on Jan. 30, Princeton won its third team point. Afterward Assaiante huddled with his players and said, "The last food you eat for the night is what you remember. We ended with a loss. This should feel like a loss. We need 30 percent more effort." The players nodded in agreement.

Assaiante then asked the boys to go into the stands and pick up the fans' trash -- water bottles and pizza boxes and programs. The coach was right there with them.