Entering his 19th year at Trinity, Head Coach Paul Assaiante and the men's squash team have had nothing short of a monumental national and international impact on the sport of squash. Last season, the Bantam run of consecutive College Squash Association (CSA) National Championships came to an end at 13 with a 5-4 defeat at the hands of Princeton in the CSA Finals in New Jersey. Trinity’s 252-game win streak, which spanned 13 undefeated seasons, ended earlier in the year with a 5-4 loss at Yale, closing the book on the longest winning streak in the history of intercollegiate varsity sports. Despite suffering its first two losses in years, Trinity ended its season with an 18-2 record, and picked up its 15th straight Association Trophy and its sixth consecutive New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) Championship crown.

The team’s unprecedented run, which began in 1998, captivated Trinity and beyond -- followed by major media outlets across the globe and the nation, including Sports Illustrated, ESPN, the New York Times, and the Hartford Courant. The history of the team will forever remain a legendary piece of history at Trinity College, where squash has been enthusiastically embraced. The team remains one of the most feared in college sports, and Assaiante, who possesses an unfathomable career record of 321-10, has etched his spot in the squash history books along the way.

Besides coaching squash, Assaiante has served as the director of athletic development at Trinity for seven years, spearheading the College's effort to upgrade its athletic facilities. In a short time, Assaiante has played a pivotal role in the fund-raising efforts, which have already produced two new synthetic outdoor fields and the nation's premier squash facility for the College. In all, more than $11 million has been raised with ongoing projects that include a new boathouse, baseball and softball diamonds, and a community ice skating center. Trinity's remodeled tennis courts were christened as the Paul D. Assaiante Tennis Center in the fall of 2010.

From 1999-2003 and again from 2010 to present, Assaiante coached both the United States Squash Team, which has competed in the Pan American Games, and the USA Men's Team, which finished a best-ever seventh in the World Championships in Germany this summer. Twice named the United States Olympic Committee Coach of the Year, Assaiante was named one of Connecticut’s top sports coaches of the 20th century by The Hartford Courant, and recently earned an award from the Hartford Business Bureau for his outstanding contribution to sports in the city. He has returned to international coaching as the United States Squash Coach, leading the U.S. men to a best-ever sixth-place finish at the World Championships in Paderborn, Germany in 2011 this summer and the U.S. Junior Team to an eighth-place finish in the 2012 World Championships in Qatar this summer.

Assaiante has also coached the Trinity men's tennis squad for 16 of the last 18 seasons, notching a 172-79 record. In 2010-11, Assaiante guided the squad to a 9-8 dual match record and earned a fifth straight bid to the six-team, NESCAC Championship Tournament. The team finished the season ranked No. 5 in the ITA Division III Northeast Regional Poll and No. 18 in the ITA Division III National Poll. Assaiante earned NESCAC and Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) Northeast Regional Coach of the Year in 2008.

Assaiante is a 1974 graduate of Springfield College and holds a master's degree from Long Island University. His coaching experience includes stints at the United States Military Academy Club Team for several seasons and at Williams College in 1988-89, where he was 8-4 to give him a 311-12 overall career varsity record. He was also a squash professional at the world-famous Princeton Club of New York and director of racquet sports at the Baltimore Country Club, the Apawamis Club in Rye, N.Y., and the Bellevue Athletic Club in Seattle, Wash.

Assaiante's professional athletic career was nothing short of spectacular. He won the World Hardball Doubles Championship in 1988. He was one-half of the U.S. national doubles championship duo in 1994 and captured the USSRA 50-and-over men's squash title in 2004. Assaiante is also an author of Championship Tennis by the Experts: How to Play Championship Tennis, with Vic Braden (Human Kinetics Publishers, June 1981) and Run to the Roar: Coaching to Overcome Fear with James Zug (Penguin).