U.S. Teams Gird Up For Quadrennial Pan American Games in Mexico
by Rob Dinerman, for DailySquashReport.com
Dateline October 10 --- U. S. Squash will be entering teams in the men’s and women’s squash portion of the 16th edition of the quadrennial Pan American Games, which begin this week in Guadalajara, Mexico. Forty-two countries will be competing in dozens of sports, with the squash events to occur from October 15-21. Unlike the World Team Championships, in which each team has four members, three of whom play in any given match against another country, in the Pan American Games only three players comprise the team, which means that each member has to play in every match to avoid a default that would be very costly to the team tally. U. S. Men’s coach Chris Walker, now recovered from a midsummer illness, will be coaching both the men’s and women’s teams.
The men’s squad originally consisted of Julian Illingworth, winner of the U. S. Nationals for each of the past seven years, Gilly Lane, the former Penn star who has been runner-up to Illingworth at the Nationals for the past three years, and Chris Gordon, Nationals finalist in 2008. But Lane has been plagued for the past few months by a bulging disc in his back, and he exacerbated this injury so severely during his late-September first-round qualifying loss in the U. S. Open that he will be sidelined for the next several months and is out of the Pan American Games. His spot will instead go to Graham Bassett, Lane’s mid-2000’s college teammate, who won the Trials competition in New York this past spring. Mexico will be tough to beat, boasting a powerful lineup of the Salazar twin brothers, Cesar and Arturo, joined by Eric Galvez, and will also enjoy the considerable advantage (in terms of both the “altitude factor” and the partisan crowd) of playing on their own turf. But Canada, led by Shahier Razik and a notably in-form Shawn Delierre, will be a strong contender, as will the teams from Colombia and Brazil.
The U. S. women’s team entry will similarly be fielding an altered lineup. A “dream team” trio of five-time reigning U. S. champion and former British Open and World Open finalist Natalie Grainger, 2010 World Junior Champion and current WISPA top-20 Amanda Sobhy and five-time National champion Latasha Khan would have been prohibitive favorites to cop gold medals in both the Team and Individual events. However none of the three will be playing, in Grainger’s case due to the torn knee ligaments she suffered in her left leg while playing tennis on a rain-affected Har-Tru tennis court last month (she will be in a leg brace for a few more weeks but expects to be able to avoid surgery) and in Sobhy’s since she has just begun her freshman year at Harvard and, laudably, has opted not to miss the week’s worth of classes that participating in Mexico would have entailed.
The 18-year-old just-turned-pro Olivia Blatchford will therefore be heading an American women’s team that will also have former (2006) Intercollegiate Individuals winner Lily Lorentzen and highly ranked junior Maria Elena Ubina. The teams will be flying from New York to Houston today (except for Illingworth, who played in a PSA event at Stanford University this weekend -- losing in the first round to Alister Walker -- and will therefore travel from California to meet the team in Houston) and from there to Guadalajara tomorrow, which will give them several days to acclimate to the court and especially the altitude conditions before the squash portion of the Pan American Games competition begins on Saturday.
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