Preview Of The 2011-12 WDSA Women’s Pro Doubles Tour
by Rob Dinerman
Dateline October 11th --- Buoyed by an intriguing mix of newly-contending teams, burgeoning rivalries, loyal sponsors, established stars and fresh young talent, the Women’s Doubles Squash Association (WDSA) will be kicking off its fifth tour season this coming weekend with the inaugural $15,000 Philadelphia Open, hosted by the Philadelphia Country Club. The top-ranked team of Suzie Pierrepont and Narelle Krizek, winners of five of their six tournaments together since forming in December 2010, including the season-ending stop in Los Angeles this past May, will be the No. 1 seed, followed by the Meredeth Quick/Steph Hewitt pairing that was 2010 Indian Summer Open champs and three times the runner-up team to Pierrepont and Krizek, whom Quick/Hewitt led two games to one in April in the semifinals of the Players Championship before grudgingly ceding the final two games.
Krizek and Pierrepont followed that successful late-match rally by avenging their only defeat in their next-day final against Natalie Grainger and Amanda Sobhy, who had ambushed them four months earlier in the final of the Turner Cup on the same University Club of New York glass-back-wall doubles court. These two elite pairings potentially could create an amazing top-tier rivalry, though that will have to wait a bit, as Sobhy, the 2010 World Junior champion in singles, recently began her freshman year at Harvard, where her scholastic and intercollegiate squash commitments will likely commandeer most of her time and energy, while former WISPA No. 1 Grainger tore the medial collateral ligament in her left knee on a rain-softened tennis court a few weeks ago and is out of action for several months. Also sidelined by injury for the time being are Alicia McConnell (sprained wrist), a semifinalist with Stephanie Edmison last season at the Turner Cup, and Dana Betts, who underwent midsummer surgery for a torn labrum in her left (playing) shoulder and is on track for a January return.
Betts’s regular partner, her Heights Casino club-mate Emily Lungstrum, frequent semifinalists the past two seasons, will be playing in Philadelphia with Natarsha McElhinny, who last spring teamed with her younger sister Krizek to become the first pair of sisters to win the U. S. National Doubles. They will be seeded in the top four, as will the veteran Philadelphia pairing of long-time partners Amy Milanek and Dawn Gray, ahead of the remaining three team entries, namely Marci Sier (winner of a tour stop in Chicago in ’09 with Krizek) and Lynn Leong, Joyce Davenport (who with partner Karen Jerome were a third-game tiebreaker from defeating top seeds and eventual champs Hewitt and McElhinny in St. Paul last autumn) and Kat Grant, and the British-born, Philadelphia-based duo of Tina Rix and Carrie Hastings.
The current 2011-12 WDSA Tour schedule includes the U. S. Open (as part of the ISDA men’s pro doubles tour Briggs Cup) in Rye, NY, in December, the Hashim Khan Open in Denver in March, the Players Championship in New York in April, the Turner Cup (whose $50,000 purse a year ago was the largest of any doubles event, WDSA or ISDA, in the world during the 2010-11 season) in May and a new event, the $25,000 Wilson Cup, which will culminate the season in July in the Hamptons. To be eligible for this latter tourney, one has to be either ranked in the top 16 or a member of either the intercollegiate-winning team (a distinction already earned by Penn co-captains Nabilla Ariffin and Pia Trikha earlier this month) or the U. S. Under-30 winning team when that event is held this coming spring.
There were no fewer than four WDSA protagonists who came away with at least two tournament titles last season, namely Krizek, Pierrepont, Hewitt and McElhinny, and any top-tier listing would have to also include Grainger and Sobhy. This sextet, and the solid field of established players behind them (most of whom will be competing in Philadelphia this weekend), will be joined as the season progresses with a major infusion of relative newcomers, many of whom are hungry to build upon the marks they made last season. Among these will be Edmison, who also won the Canadian National singles title; Seanna Keating, who with Canadian compatriot Hewitt defeated Krizek/McElhinny in the World Doubles final in Toronto this past May; the five-time U. S. singles champion Latasha Khan, a finalist in LA with Sobhy; Larissa Stephenson, a Turner Cup quarterfinalist with Davenport; U. S. National Mixed Doubles finalist Carrie Hastings; Fernanda Rocha, who in 2011 won both the U. S. Under-30 Women’s with Stephenson and the Under-30 Mixed with Greg McArthur, and who would have played in Philadelphia were it not for a prior commitment to the quadrennial Pan American Games in Mexico that same weekend; and former Vassar star Shirin Kaufman. Boosted by this alignment of stars, sites and sponsors, the WDSA appears well positioned to make this milestone fifth season both memorable and compelling.
This article first appeared on wdsatour.com, which will be posting updated results throughout the Philadelphia Open this coming weekend.
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