Amanda Sobhy, Natalie Grainger to Round Out Impressive Weekend WDSA Turner Cup Field
by Rob Dinerman

Dateline January 20th ---- Defending champions Narelle Krizek and Suzie Pierrepont headline an excellent 12-team field set to compete this coming weekend in the $20,000 Turner Cup, hosted for the second straight year by the Westchester Country Club in Rye and benefiting Squash Haven. The first of two qualifying rounds begin Thursday evening, with the second qualifying matches Friday morning and the quarterfinals later on Friday, to be followed by the semis late Saturday afternoon and the final at 1 PM on Sunday, with several pro-am flights taking place throughout the weekend.

    Krizek and Pierrepont have won 13 WDSA sanctioned ranking tournaments over the last six years, the most of any team in the Association’s history, including the last nine events they have entered dating back to their last loss, which occurred in May 2012 in the final of that season’s Turner Cup at the hands of Meredeth Quick and Steph Hewitt. The latter duo, which won the U. S. National Doubles and the U. S. Open in 2012, as well as the season-ending Wilson Cup this past July, reached the final of last season’s Turner Cup and are seeded second in this year’s event. The two third/fourth seeds are both first-time pairings, consisting of Carrie Hastings/Tarsh McElhinny and Dana Betts/Latasha Khan. Betts, who underwent successful hip surgery to repair a torn labrum last spring, teamed up with Sarah West to take the William White tournament at the Merion Cricket Club earlier this month after previously partnering Hewitt to the WDSA Cincinnati Open title in November. There they won a straight-set final over McElhinny and Krizek, who had taken the WDSA season-opening Philadelphia Open in early October with a four-game final-round win over Hewitt and Quick.

   The other two main-draw teams will be the veteran Philadelphians Amy Milanek and Dawn Gray along with Amanda Sobhy and Victoria Simmonds. Sobhy, the Harvard senior and reigning three-time Intercollegiate Individuals champion, like several of the other Turner Cup entrants, is also playing in the Tournament of Champions singles event in mid-town Manhattan, which began earlier this week, and would therefore be facing an extremely full playing schedule on Friday if she makes it to the singles final, which will be played at 6 PM that night, four hours after she and Simmonds are scheduled to play their first-round Turner Cup match against Betts and Khan!

   Natalie Grainger, who teamed up with Sobhy to capture the 2013 World Doubles, and who along with Jess DiMauro formed the No. 1 ranked team in the early years of the WDSA tour, will be entered in the qualifying with Greenwich Academy No. 1 player Kaylee Leonard, who had partnered up with Pierrepont in a run to the semis of the U. S. National Doubles last spring. The qualifying draw is further enlivened by the presence of a number of WSA pro singles players --- including four-time British Open champ Rachael Grinham, two-time Carol Weymuller Open winner Jenny Duncalf and their WSA colleagues Sarah-Jane Perry, Hollie Naughton and Aisling Blake --- who are playing in either the Tournament of Champions, the Harrow Invitational (which will be held just after the Tournament of Champions concludes in several of the Greenwich clubs), or both. The seeded teams in the Turner Cup qualifying are Tehani Guruge (a finalist along with Pierrepont at this past summer’s Wilson Cup) and the ageless Canadian Karen Jerome in one bracket, and Amy Gross, a U. S. Open finalist last December along with Alex Clarke, and former Trinity College star Fernanda Rocha in the other. It promises to be an exciting weekend and a dramatic way to launch the calendar 2015 portion of this season’s WDSA schedule.