Kayley Leonard And Maria Elena Ubina Surge To Victory At The Inaugural Women’s Heights Casino Open by Rob Dinerman
photo Heights Casino
Dateline October 31, 2022
--- Top seeds Kayley Leonard and Maria Elena Ubina, the No. 1 ranked
team for the 2021-22 season, consolidated their supremacy over the rest
of the field this past weekend by sweeping through the 10-team draw at
the inaugural women’s Heights Casino Open. They culminated their march
to the winner’s circle with a convincing 15-11, 6 and 13 final-round
victory Sunday afternoon over second seeds (and 2020 U. S. National
Doubles champions) Elani and Lume Landman.
The Landman sisters had reached the final with a pair of straight-game
tallies over first Georgina Stoker and Rachel Mashek and then Julie
Cerullo (an “alumna” of the host club’s vaunted junior program and
later the No. 1 player on Princeton’s 2013 Ivy League championship
team) and Vic Simmonds, quarters winners over Katie Tutrone (Leonard’s
former college teammate on Harvard’s perennial national championship
teams) and Adel Sammons. Leonard and Ubina, after a 3-0 opener over
Nayelly Hernandez-Walker and her Mexican compatriot Sarah Lopez
Dominguez, had taken each of the first two games of their semifinal
tilt with Meredeth Quick and Suzie Pierrepont in single figures. Both
Quick and Pierrepont played much better in the third game, taking
advantage of a letdown on the part of the Leonard/Ubina pairing and
winning that game handily 15-8. The first half of the fourth game was
contested on even terms, but at that juncture and with her team
trailing 7-6, Pierrepont, trying to change direction to chase down
misdirection shot off Ubina’s racquet, collapsed to the floor, having
injured her right knee too badly for the match to continue.
The two finalists had met on several times in finals last season, and,
although Leonard and Ubina had prevailed on each occasion, the matches
had for the most part been hard-fought and highly competitive,
especially their first encounter last October, when the Landmans had
led two games to one before being overtaken at the very end. But in
this match in Brooklyn Heights, Leonard and Ubina carried the play
right throughout in a display of positional and tactical superiority
that enabled them to inexorably establish leads by the middle of each
game that were too substantial to overcome. Leonard was solid and
unshakable, lobbing Lume Landman to the back-right of the court and
burying straight drops and reverse-corners. Her partner (and former
high-school teammate for several years on Greenwich Academy’s U. S.
National High School championship teams) Ubina was an absolute magician
with both her imagination and her racquet, demonstrating a level of
creativity and shot-making skills that led to a host of untouchable
dead-nick winners and had her opponents off-balance and constantly
reacting to her salvos, rather than forcing anywhere near enough
opportunities to initiate the attack themselves.
With all that, and even while trailing by three- and four-point margins
throughout most of the third game, the Landman sisters courageously
boot-strapped their way back into contention, making several emergency
gets and fending off two match-balls-against to close to 13-14. But on
the ensuing point Elani Landman --- who had partnered Chris Coco to
victory in the pro-am final, 15-14 in the fifth, over Simmonds and Josh
Charlton immediately preceding the pro final --- tinned a forehand
volley. She and her sister will not have to wait long for a chance to
exact some revenge, since the NYC Open at the University Club of New
York, is scheduled to take place just two weeks from now.
