WDSA John’s Island Open Final: Pierrepont And Krizek Triumph Over Quick And Hewitt  
by Rob Dinerman

Dateline April 27th --- Chastened by the loss of a second game in which they yielded the final eight points after leading 14-7, top seeds and defending champions Narelle Krizek and Suzie Pierrepont regained control with late-game runs of their own in the third and fourth and defeated Meredeth Quick and Steph Hewitt 15-13 14-15 15-8 15-12 to win the second annual John’s Island Open, sponsored by John’s Island Real Estate, in Vero Beach, Florida. It was the eighth straight tournament win for Krizek and Pierrepont, dating back to their last loss, in the Turner Cup final to Hewitt and Quick in May 2012, with a possible rematch between these two top WDSA teams to come in this year’s Turner Cup three weeks hence at the Westchester Country Club in Rye.

   Pierrepont and Krizek often seem to struggle in the first game of their matches, as witness the 15-14 scores of their straight-set pre-final matches against first Alex Clark and Emily Lungstrum and then Amanda Sobhy and Latasha Khan. This time as well they were met on nearly equal terms by Hewitt and Quick, until Krizek rolled out a forehand three-wall from deep in the court at 14-13 that averted what would have been a third straight opening-game simultaneous-game-ball. Relieved by this narrow escape, they controlled the second game, both statistically and territorially, all the way to 14-7, at which juncture for some reason they abandoned the high-paced pressure tactics that had heretofore worked so well, instead floating the ball and giving Hewitt and Quick openings to exploit. Both hit several front-court winners that enabled them to tie the game at 14-all, and on the ensuing exchange Krizek went for a volleyed cross-drop that caught the tin.

   That kind of late-game reversal has hurt Pierrepont/Krizek in the past against this pair of opportunistic opponents, most notably in their two losses to this pair during the 2011-12 season, when in the finals of both the Philadelphia Open and the aforementioned Turner Cup, Quick and Hewitt had rallied from behind to first-game one-point wins and gone on to victory in wresting the No. 1 team ranking for that year from Krizek and Pierrepont. But this time the latter duo were able to right themselves, seizing the third game with a 7-0 run from 8-all with an unrelenting attack that also came to the fore in the three-point match-ending string from 12-all in the fourth. In both cases, Quick and Hewitt, though frequently on the defensive, had hung in as long as they could but were unable to suppress the multi-front Pierrepont/Krizek weaponry down the stretch.

  Prior to the WDSA final, two pro-am finals were played, with Clark and Jason Sevier defeating Dana Betts and Danny Dolan 9-15 15-11 15-7 15-7 in the Open pro-am and Sobhy and Leo Pierce taking the A pro-am final with a 15-14, 9 and 11 win over Tarsh McElhinny and Bob Thibodeau. The tour resumes next week with the MetroSquash Open in Chicago, with the Turner Cup to follow two weeks later.




 

 

 

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