Women’s Pro Doubles Recap: Steph Hewitt And Dana Betts Capture Cincinnati Open    
By Rob Dinerman

Dateline November 9th --- Dana Betts and Steph Hewitt stormed to victory in the second annual Cincinnati Open this weekend without the loss of a single game. After receiving a bye to the semifinal round of the six-team draw, Betts and Hewitt took three single-digit games over Vic Simmonds and Karen Jerome (straight-game quarterfinal winners over Tehani Guruge and Emily Lungstrum) to reach today’s final, where they defeated top seeds Narelle Krizek and Tarsh McElhinny by scores of 15-14,13 and 8.

    Krizek and McElhinny had won the inaugural event of the season, the Philadelphia Open, on the first weekend of October with a convincing four-game final-round victory over Hewitt and Meredeth Quick in which McElhinny’s superb front-court game had been a decisive factor. Wary of that outcome five weeks back, Hewitt (who had emerged relatively intact after incurring a broken nose late in the second game of the semis when it was struck by a drive off her own partner’s bat) made sure to cross-court lob McElhinny to the back left this time, reducing the latter’s opportunities to shoot and forcing her to deal with the left-handed Betts’s power-hitting and aggressive shot-making, both of which were operating at top level this afternoon, as witness the pair of winners she hit to rescue the first game from 13-14 (on a shallow rail followed by a tight reverse-corner) and the several times she passed Krizek with cross-court drives, including, most importantly, at 14-13 in the second that gave her team a two games to love lead.

   McIlhinny was under much more pressure than she had been either in the Philadelphia Open final or in Saturday’s semifinal three-love win over Dawn Gray and Amy Milanek (who had rallied from two games to one down to overtake Canadians Marci Sier and Tara Mullins, 15-12 in the fifth, in Friday’s other quarterfinal), and Krizek, rendered less able to influence the action than she had been in last month’s event, consequently tried to do a little too much with the opportunities that did come her way. By midway through the third and final game, Betts and Hewitt, buoyed by the pair of consecutive airtight tallies that by then had landed in their column, were in full control as they sprinted through the final stanza to the winner’s circle.

   In the aftermath of the notification just a few weeks ago by U. S. Squash that it had decided to cancel the U. S. Open Doubles, which for months had been on the schedule in an early-December time slot, the calendar 2014 portion of the WDSA women’s pro doubles tour has now concluded. The tour will resume this winter and has a very heavy schedule planned both for that period and especially for the springtime months, with details due to be released in the next few weeks.