SDA Autumn Wrap-Up: Six Men’s Tournaments, Six Different Winners; Leonard/Ubina Dominate Women’s Schedule by Rob Dinerman Dateline January 9, 2023---
James Stout’s blistering forehand cross-court down the middle in
between his and partner Scott Arnold’s Briggs Cup final-round opponents
Adam Bews and Colin West sealed a decisive 15-6, 6 and 10 victory for
the Stout/Arnold pairing and concluded a noteworthy Autumn 2022 portion
of the Squash Doubles Association (SDA) season in which the six ranking
tournaments were won by six different teams and the theoretical maximum
12 different players. The way the wealth was so widely spread out in
recent months is in marked contrast to a season-ending stretch this
past spring in which Manek Mathur (who wound up at No. 1 in the 2021-22
season-end rankings for the fourth time) and Chris Callis swept the
last four tournaments they entered, those being Boston, Cleveland, the
Kellner Cup in New York and the North American Open Doubles in
Greenwich.
The 2022-23 season began in Louisville, the first
professional squash tournament in that city since the 1972 North
American Open (singles), where Lyell Fuller and Lockie Munro, finalists
this past March in the U. S. National Doubles, were able to defeat top
seeds Chris Walker and Jaymie Haycocks in the final. Then in St. Louis,
Osama Khalifa and Kyle Martino, finalists in Cleveland this past April,
swept to victory with a four-game final-round win over Bews and Will
Hartigan, semis winners over Walker and Haycocks.
Khalifa and Martino carried that momentum into the Big
Apple Open, held as always at the New York Athletic Club (NYAC) in
midtown Manhattan, where, after a round-of-16 win over qualifiers
Alex Schwartz and Joel Jaume Iscara, they took a two games to one
lead over Mathur and Callis, who, however were able to win the last two
games --- thereby recording their fifth consecutive tournament win
dating back to last spring) --- following which they out-played first
Bews and Matthew Henderson (quarters winners over Fuller and Munro) and
then former PSA top-15 players Ryan Cuskelly and Cameron Pilley in a
four-game final. Cuskelly and Pilley had recorded a four-game
semifinal win over Clinton Leeuw (the head pro at the host club) and
Haycocks, who had gotten to that stage with an airtight (15-13 in the
fourth and fifth games) win over Elroy Leong and Tor Christofferson,
followed by an unexpected but convincing four-game semis win over
second seed Zac Alexander and James Bamber. Although both Khalifa
and Henderson fell victim to Callis and Mathur at various stages of the
Big Apple Open draw, they did team up in a run to the winner’s circle
of the Silver Racquets, an Open-level invitational that was held during
the same early-November weekend at the Racquet & Tennis Club just
nine blocks southeast of the NYAC.
Chastened by their loss to Haycocks and Leeuw,
Bamber and Alexander determinedly swept through the Sleepy Hollow draw
a few weeks later with wins, over, sequentially, Hameed Ahmed and Chris
Sachvie (the associate head coach at Harvard and the first-year head
coach at Columbia respectively), Leeuw and Harcocks (avenging the Big
Apple Open loss, albeit with a 15-14 second game after they had lost
the first) and Mathur and Callis, who saw their 19-match winning streak
come to an end in a four-game final in which Alexander and Bamber, just
as they had done one round earlier, came away with another 15-14 game
(this time the first game rather than the second) en route to their
eventual victory.
After a one-week Thanksgiving break, the tour resumed in
early December with the welcome return of the Wilmington Country Club
tour stop after a four-year hiatus. Leeuw and Haycocks fulfilled their
No. 1 seeding, but only after rallying after losing the first two games
(both 15-14) in their semifinal round match against David Letourneau
and Kelly Shannon, former childhood friends growing up in Calgary,
former teammates on the powerful Princeton teams a little more than a
decade ago, and winners at the last SDA tournament (in early March
2020) before the SDA tour was shut down for 21 months by the Covid-19
pandemic. After barely salvaging the 15-13 third game, Leeuw and
Haycocks won both the fourth and fifth (prior to which their opponents
switched walls in a vain attempt to reverse the momentum) in dominant
fashion, then three-gamed Clive Leach and Ricardo Lopez Valdivia in the
final. Notwithstanding that latter result, getting to the final was a
great result for Leach --- who a few weeks earlier marked his 50th
birthday --- and his young partner, most notably in their four-game
semifinal win over Josh Hughes and BG Lemmon, who earlier had ousted
second seeds Fuller and Munro.
The culmination of the men’s autumn SDA season was the
milestone 10th edition of the biennial Briggs Cup, which actually was
being held for the first time in three years (rather than the usual
two) due to the pandemic-caused cancellation of the entire 2020-21 SDA
season. Stout and Arnold, finalists in the season-ending Kellner
Cup and North American Open in early May and champions a few months
before that at Heights Casino, made their season debut a smashing
success by posting a pair of tough four-game wins in the quarters and
semis respectively over Michael Ferreira/Will Hartigan and
Cuskelly/Pilley and then asserting full control in the Monday-night
final against Bews and West. Both Stout and Arnold had lost Briggs Cup
finals with other partners (Arnold with John Russell in 2017 and Stout
with Greg McArthur in 2019). Mathur and Callis had won this tournament
the last time it was held in December 2019, but they were unable to
defend since Callis’s honeymoon wound up dovetailing with the
Briggs Cup dates after the tournament was pushed back six weeks from
its original late-October placement. Mathur and his substitute partner,
Mathur’s former Trinity College teammate/classmate Randy Lim, managed
to edge Walker/Leach, 15-13 in the fifth in their opening round, but
they then lost in four games to Bews and West, who proceeded to win
their semi 3-0 against Leeuw and Haycocks, five-game quarters winners
over Khalifa and Martino. Although there are several people who have
won the Briggs Cup multiple times, chief among them being Damien Mudge,
who won the event five times with five different partners --- namely
with Michael Pirnak in the inaugural holding in 2003, Gary Waite in
2005, Viktor Berg in 2009, Ben Gould in the latter’s swan song in 2015
and Mathur in 2017 --- no team has ever won it more than once.
The autumn portion of SDA women’s tour featured tour stops
in Brooklyn (the Women’s Heights Casino Open), Manhattan (the NYC Open,
held at the University Club of New York) and Rye (the women’s Briggs
Cup). At Brooklyn Heights Kayley Leonard and Maria Elena Ubina, who had
won all three of the final-round matches that they had had during the
2021-22 season with the Landman twins, Elani and Lume, reasserted
themselves in this final as well, jumping out right away to an 11-4
lead in the first game en route to 15-11, 6 and 13. The Landman sisters
had won their pair of pre-final matches (against Gina Stoker/Rachel
Mashek and Julie Cerullo/Vic Simmonds) in three games, while in the
top-half semifinal, Leonard and Ubina had taken the first two games in
single figures but lost the third to Meredeth Quick and Suzie
Pierrepont. 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 a misdirection shot off
Ubina’s racquet, collapsed to the ground, having injured her right knee
(later diagnosed as a torn ACL that required surgery) too badly for the
match to continue.
The NYC Open two weeks later devolved into a final-round
rematch --- but not a replay --- between these two teams. The Landmans
again blew through their half of the draw, again at the semifinal
expense of Cerullo and Simmonds, but in the top half, Leonard and Ubina
lost the first game of their match against Nikki Todd and Katie
Tutrone, who almost took the third as well before losing that game
15-13 and the close-out fourth 15-8. The ensuing final was different in
a number of respects from the match in Brooklyn a fortnight earlier.
First and foremost, this time it was the Landmans who grabbed the early
initiative, giving them a level of purpose and confidence that was
abetted by the patience they demonstrated in successfully applying
their strategy of using the height of the court to lob their opponents
to the back wall and then shoot when they had an opening. In Brooklyn,
the points had been relatively short, with both Leonard and Ubina
establishing front-court position and scoring winners, whereas at the
high-ceilinged University Club --- a marked contrast to the environment
at Heights Casino, whose lower ceiling and hanging beam made it almost
impossible to effectively execute lobs and skid-boasts --- the Landmans
were able to lob much more effectively and prevent Leonard and Ubina
from implementing the quick-strike capacity that had served them so
well a fortnight earlier.
With all that, and even after trailing 13-8 in the third
game after narrowly falling short in the second, Leonard and Ubina drew
to 12-13 and then (after Leonard tinned a drop shot) to 14-all on a
pair of nervy Leonard winners, the second of which (a tightly angled
forehand reverse corner) ended a point that Ubina had kept alive with a
remarkable “emergency” retrieve near the back wall a few exchanges
earlier. Losing that game after having such a seemingly safe lead
against opponents whom they had never beaten might have been a tough
hurdle for the Landman sisters to overcome. But Elani Landman responded
to the exigencies of the moment by burying a shallow backhand drive
that stayed too low for Leonard to scoop up, eliciting a shriek of
triumph from both winning players and providing a dramatic competitive
backdrop to the Briggs Cup four weeks later, prior to which most people
expected a final-round autumn rubber match between the top two teams.
Leonard and Ubina did their part, playing beautifully in a
highly competitive four-game quarterfinal win over 2017 Briggs Cup
finalists Tina Rix and Fernanda Rocha, a match in which Leonard’s
shallow forehand drive winner at 14-all in the third game proved
crucial. Leonard and Ubina then won their semi 3-0 over Celia Pashley
and Lauren West. However, in the draw’s bottom half, first-time
partners Stoker and Line Hansen ran off a trio of three-game victories
over Dana Betts/Quick, Cerullo/Simmonds and, most notably, the
Landmans, who seemed out of sorts from the start, giving Stoker and
Hansen an opening which they opportunistically seized and held on to
throughout their 15-10, 13 and 10 route to the final.
They had their chances against Leonard and Ubina as well
but were unable to come away with the points at the end-stage of each
of the 15-13, 14 and 13 games. Trailing 14-10 in the first, they ran
off three straight points before Stoker tinned a backhand volley. At
14-all in the second, Leonard hit a forehand cross-court that Hansen
got her racquet on but was unable to steer back into play. Hansen and
Stoker then led 11-4, 12-6 and 13-8 in the third game, only to
surrender a match-ending 7-0 run in which Ubina hit four winners,
including one on a serve-return and a well-disguised forehand
roll-corner on the final point.
The men’s tour resumed on the first full weekend of
January with the Ox Ridge Open in Darien, which was won by Cuskelly,
the head pro at the host club, and Pilley, whose triumph made it seven
different winning teams (and 14 different winning players) in seven
tournaments to this juncture of the 2022-23 season by carrying their
No. 1 seeding through the weekend without dropping a game. Cuskelly and
Pilley defeated, sequentially, Ricardo Lopez and Scott Young,
qualifiers Sanjay Jeeva and Sergio Martin (quarters winners over Chris
Walker and Clive Leach) and Elroy Leong and Chris Binnie, who had
emerged from an upset-filled bottom half of the draw in quarterfinal
round of which they beat second seeds (and recent Briggs Cup
semifinalists Clinton Leeuw and Jaymie Haycocks) while qualifiers BG
Lemmon and Josh Hughes narrowly defeated Michael Ferreira and Bernardo
Samper, 15-13 in the fifth. Both the SDA men and women will be
competing in the North American Open in Greenwich in two weeks, leading
to a full schedule throughout the winter and spring months.
