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cavalier sports FEBRUARY 2021 9 getting to know Squash Fourth-Year Christian Kohlmeyer F ourth-year Christian Kohlmeyer is part of UVA athletics his- tory. He is one of three fourth-years on this year's men's squash team, all three of whom are the first four-year letter winners for the program. Kohlmeyer, along with Andrew Braff and Matthew Katz, were first-years in the fall of 2017 when the program played its first season as a varsity sport. This was history that he initially had not planned on being a part of. Kohlmeyer has been playing squash since he was in the fifth grade and was the captain of his team at The Hotchkiss School in Con- necticut, but he vetted his potential universities based on academics. "I would meet with coaches when I was at schools, but I wasn't necessarily in the recruitment pool," Kohlmeyer explained. "What drew me to UVA was a combination of the academics and I liked the fact that squash was a potential aspect. I was really interested in the McIntire School of Commerce. "My dad had attended a four-year undergraduate business pro- gram, whereas I wanted to be able to get a mixture of a liberal arts foundation followed by a more specialized third and fourth year." Kohlmeyer enrolled at UVA and decided that he did want to be part of the squash team. He had known head coach Mark Allen through several interactions in the small world that is the squash community, but it was through his hard work and efforts at open camp in his first two weeks as an undergrad that earned him a spot on the roster. Kohlmeyer's hard work has also paid off on the other side of the equation. He is a fourth-year in the McIntire School of Commerce and has made the most of the opportunities that came with being a student at UVA, including two separate study-abroad programs. The summer after his first-year season, he enrolled in a three-week course at the London School of Economics. "I had an internship lined up in the later part of the summer, but I had idle time on my hands and I wanted to be able to travel the world, so I went with two of my teammates," he said. "I took a consumer be- havior marketing course there, and had the opportunity to play squash with my teammates because squash is so prevalent in London." It was his second study-abroad program — when he spent 10 weeks in the summer between his second and third year in Cape Town, South Africa, that proved to be life changing. "I took [liberal arts] classes focused on how the Dutch coloniza- tion of South Africa had affected the culture, how apartheid has affected modern-day society and stuff like that," Kohlmeyer said. "The next six weeks I took an investment finance course where I had the opportunity to intern at a private equity firm in Stellenbosch [in South Africa's Western Cape province]. "I had been accepted into McIntire, but I hadn't started my finance-specific education yet, so this was an early introduction to the field I wanted to pursue." It was also while he was in Cape Town that he did his initial interviews for the job he will be starting in July of this year as a full- time investment banking analyst at Bank of America in its leveraged finance group. But first, he has one last season of squash to play. — Melissa Dudek Kohlmeyer, a fourth-year in the McIntire School of Commerce, is among the first three letter win- ners for the UVA men's squash program, which began as a var- sity sport in the fall of 2017. PHOTO BY MATT RILEY/COURTESY UVA