Top Two Seeds Ryan Cuskelly And Campbell Grayson To Contest Inaugural Blue Devil Challenge In Brooklyn  
by Rob Dinerman

Dateline February 6th --- Trailing 10-9 and one point away from having to deal with what would have been a perilous fifth game against an aroused opponent hungry for a big win, second-seeded Campbell Grayson conjured up three consecutive winners and emerged with a hard-fought 9-11, 11-4, 11-6, 12-10 victory over Chris Hanson Saturday evening in the semifinal round of the $5,000 Blue Devil Challenge, held on the dynamic and brand-new facility at Poly Prep in Brooklyn. Grayson, currently ranked 45th on the PSA pro tour, will now face top seed and PSA No. 16 Ryan Cuskelly, an 11-3, 11-8, 6-11, 11-5 winner over Clinton Leeuw, in Sunday’s early-afternoon final. Both Leeuw, the only unseeded player to reach the final four in the wake of his straight-set quarterfinal victory over fourth seed Arthur Gaskin, and a visibly improved Hanson gave their favored opponents all they could handle but eventually the higher seeds asserted themselves in the defining stretches of their respective close-out fourth games, Cuskelly with a 7-1 match-ending skein from 4-all in the fourth game to 9-4, 11-5, and Grayson, as noted, by repulsing  the game-ball against him and asserting himself in the match’s  final few exchanges.

  In the first semi, Cuskelly was largely in control through the first game and most of the second, relentlessly executing his penetrating ground game and keeping Leeuw off-balance and consistently having to extemporize in unfavorable circumstances. But late in the second game, Leeuw saved three game-balls against him and crept to 8-10 by mixing in some well-placed lobs that gave him time to regain the tee while simultaneously disturbing the rhythmic pace that Cuskelly had heretofore established. Although the left-handed Cuskelly wound up winning that game on a forehand drive that clung too close to the left wall for Leeuw to return, the latter carried his strong play into and through the third game, scoring on late-swing wrist flicks and drawing some errors from Cuskelly’s racquet as well. The fourth was evenly contested, both territorially and on the scoreboard, to 4-all, whereupon Cuskelly opportunistically exploited a series of small but costly Leeuw lapses in a five-point burst to 9-4 that effectively determined the outcome. Leeuw committed a pair of consecutive backhand tins on the final two points. Ultimately Cuskelly was able to convert his openings more efficiently than Leeuw, but this was a tough all-court battle all the way through.

   So was the ensuing battle between Grayson and Hanson, who seemed the more eager player at the match’s outset, especially during a mid-game run from 5-all to 10-6 in which Grayson hit several errors that appeared to stem more from frustration than any technical deficiency in his swing. Grayson grimly drew to 9-10 but Hanson, a southpaw like his Westchester training partner Cuskelly, responded by lashing a forehand with perfect width down the left wall to finish off that game. However, he was unable to sustain the high level at which he played the first game, contributing three tins, two of them on the first two points, to Grayson’s 6-0 lead in the second game, and yielding a five-point run at 4-all in the third, just as Leeuw had done at exactly the same juncture of his fourth game against Cuskelly 45 minutes earlier. After Grayson had finished off that game, the fourth became a dogfight, with increasingly physical jockeying for position at mid-court, an unending sequence of tortuous all-court exchanges and several questionable referee’s decisions, including a no-let call against Grayson that knotted the issue at 9-all.

   Angered by that ruling, Grayson tinned a forehand cross-drop to give Hanson (who had trailed 7-4 and 9-7 just minutes earlier) his 10-9 advantage. But Grayson then rose to the occasion with a backhand straight-drop winner, then benefited from a fortuitous bounce when the ball hit the left side wall and dropped straight down at so unusual an angle that Hanson was unable to react to it in time. At match-ball, Grayson carved a front-court winner down the right wall, but Hanson clearly has come a long way and currently plays with a spark and an energy level that his game lacked as recently as last season.

   Perhaps the biggest winner of the night was the actual venue itself, an extremely impressive six-court facility (including two stadium four-glass-wall courts) that, combined with the three previously-existing courts, gives Poly Prep an imposing nine courts, all this in a city that has been steadily hemorrhaging  squash courts (including the four that were lost just last month when the Uptown Racquet Club closed its doors after 40 years) in recent years. Former PSA No. 1 Peter Nicol, who was present in the gallery all night, is in residence at the school, and CitySquash is using the facility as well for a Brooklyn-based addition to the youth-enrichment program it has run in the Bronx for nearly 20 years. In a winter that has had its share of ups and downs in the squash world, this is one noteworthy instance of the sport taking a significant step in a positive direction.


Semis Results:

Ryan Cuskelly d. Clinton Leeuw, 11-3, 11-8, 6-11, 11-5.

Campbell Grayson d. Chris Hanson, 9-11, 11-4, 11-6, 12-10.