Suzie Pierrepont And Narelle Krizek Dominate US Open Doubles Championship   
by Rob Dinerman

Narelle Krizek, Suzie Pierrepont (Champions), Alex Grant, Amy Gross (Finalists)

Dateline December 8th --- In a devastating weekend-long display of the supremacy they currently enjoy over the rest of the WDSA field, top seeds Narelle Krizek and Suzie Pierrepont strode to victory without the loss of a single game in the 2013 U. S. Open Doubles tourney hosted by the Philadelphia Country Club, capping off their three-match nine-game march with a thoroughly convincing 15-6, 7 and 11 win early this afternoon over surprise finalists Amy Gross and Alex Clark, who had followed a successful qualifying effort with consecutive wins first over second seeds (and finalists several weeks ago in the season-opening Cincinnati Open) Steph Hewitt and Tarsh McElhinny in five games and then over Heidi Mather and Victoria Simmonds, themselves route-going upset quarterfinal victors over third seeds Carrie Hastings and Tina Rix.

  As clearly referenced by the foregoing, the draw’s bottom half was the scene of most of the tournament’s drama, as Clark and Gross, momentum still in hand from their straight-game qualifying-round win over Kat Grant and Lissen Tutrone early Friday afternoon, shocked Hewitt (who had shot the lights out in partnering Tom Boldt to the Mixed Doubles portion of the Canadian Century Cup just five days earlier) and McElhinny several hours later by weathering narrow setbacks in the first and fourth games and earning a 14-15 15-13 15-4 13-15 15-11 victory. They then faced Mather and Simmonds, who had emerged from a wildly undulating Friday-evening battle of their own in which they took early control of the fifth game, which they won 15-7 against Rix and Hastings, thereby guaranteeing that a non-seed would reach the final. A Simmonds hot streak, buttressed by Mather’s solid, error-free play, gave them the first game 15-7, but after that the left-handed Gross, a mid-2000’s co-captain of Yale’s championship teams, upped the pace, Clark increasingly established her short game (particularly her forehand reverse-corner, which accounted for a number of winners, hit mostly on balls that bounced before the red line), and the pair swept the remaining trio of games, 15-7, 11 and 12, with Gross contributing the final tally when she terminated a long and “cautious” exchange (with all four players avoiding taking any chances) by impulsively and successfully going for broke on a reverse-corner that died well before Mather could react.

   Meanwhile, the draw’s top half was going much more according to form, with Pierrepont and Krizek dispatching Amy Milanek and Dawn Gray in three and fourth seeds Dana Betts and Sarah West winning 15-14 in the third over Gina Stoker and Joyce Davenport, five-game qualifying winners over former Trinity College teammates Fernanda Rocha and Larissa Stephenson. Betts and West had their best shot in the first game, which they led 14-11, but after a four-point Pierrepont/Krizek game-ending burst they were home free in the 15-7, 15-10 remainder, throughout which Krizek was firing tight reverse-corner winners and also mixing in kill shots from different distances from the front wall and Pierrepont was complementing her partner beautifully and scoring with a variety of winners of her own.

   As evidenced by the score-line, they took early command of the final and never relinquished it. Krizek was alternating skid-boasts that chased Gross to the back wall with just enough three-walls (on a very nick-friendly court) to keep her honest, and Pierrepont was equally effective in enabling herself and her teammate to establish position and force loose balls which they could punish with front-court winners. By the time the final (which was viewed by very few people due to a major snowstorm that severely hampered travel and kept men’s finalists Imran Khan and Mark Chaloner from reaching the arena until well over an hour after their scheduled 2:00 start time for their match against Clive Leach and Paul Price) had ended, less than an hour after it began, Krizek and Pierrepont had won their seventh straight WDSA tournament dating back to their last loss (to Hewitt and Meredeth Quick) in May 2012 in that year’s Turner Cup final and Pierrepont, who earlier this autumn had won both prior WDSA tour stops, in Cincinnati, as mentioned, with Krizek and at the Los Angles Open with Betts, had gone three for three so far this season. The next WDSA event is scheduled for late February in St. Louis, by which time Quick, who hurt her rotator cuff some weeks ago, will likely be back in action, and at which this tourney’s Cinderella duo of Gross and Clark will have an opportunity to add to what they achieved this weekend in Philadelphia.