Profile of Clinton Leeuw, Head Professional At The New York Athletic Club by Rob Dinerman
photos: Clinton Leeuw
Dateline May 10, 2022
--- When the most recent set of Squash Doubles Association (SDA) pro
hardball doubles tour rankings were released on May 1st, there was a
new member of the top 15, namely Clinton Leeuw, the SDA Rookie of the
Year in 2016, who has inexorably forged his way up the standings and
who reached that rarefied status for the first time in his career
largely on the strength of a series of consistent performances
highlighted by his and partner Hamed Anvari’s advance to the final
round of the Ox Ridge Openin Connecticut in mid-March, during which
they strung together wins over first former Trinity College alums Nku
Patrick and Tor Christofferson and then Chris Binnie and Chris Hanson
before losing to recently-retired PSA stand-outs Ryan Cuskelly and Cam
Pilley in the final.
These achievements capped off an intriguing and in many ways
unique squash odyssey for Leeuw, who was born in 1982 in Cape Town and
grew up the Transkie section (so named since it is located just south
of the Kie River), one of the former “homelands” within South
Africa. The latter region was designated at that time for non-white
residents and was viewed as distinct enough from the larger country of
South Africa that the Leeuw family members were required to show their
passports when they made their monthly trips to nearby South African
marketplaces in order to stock up on food and other items. As a
youngster, Leeuw played a variety of sports --- cricket, tennis, soccer
and rugby --- but only discovered squash somewhat by accident at age 11
when he wandered onto a vacant squash court (having only visited his
school’s squash facility in order to meet with a squash-playing friend
so that they could go together to rugby practice) and started hitting
the ball. He only did so for a few minutes before being joined by his
friend, but by that time Leeuw was, to use his term, “hooked by the
sport,” and resolved to pursue it further. Although during his first
few years in late middle-school and early high-school he was competing
against more experienced players and hence lost most of his matches,
the experience galvanized rather than deflated him, and his superior
fitness and athleticism, combined with the racquet skills he carried
over from tennis and a few instances of good fortune that came his way
(including once when the parent of one of his teammates stepped forward
to pay for an upcoming team trip that Leeuw would not have otherwise
been able to afford), enabled him to become one of the most prominent
junior players in South Africa, as well as to win multiple national
junior championships --- in the Under-16 and Under-19 categories ---
and attend the Wynberg Boys High School, one of the top boarding
schools in the country, during his last three high-school years on a
full scholarship.
In 1998, Leeuw’s junior year, he and his teammates went abroad
for the first time, playing the British, Scottish and Irish Junior
Opens, and this trip crystallized his ambition to play the sport
professionally. In 2004, he moved to Germany (a good location for a
squash player to be based, since throughout the first decade of the
2000’s most of the events on the Professional Squash Association (PSA)
circuit were held in Europe), where he spent the next seven years
before moving to Boston in 2011 to coach for a company called TOG (“The
Osman Group”) that had been established a few years earlier by Nadeem
Osman --- a friend, contemporary and fellow South African who had
played on Trinity College’s national championship teams during the
first decade of the 2000’s --- that sent out its members to coach at
various New England prep schools and colleges. Since Leeuw was still
competing on the PSA circuit, he was often assigned to go to the
schools that had particularly gifted top players, as was the case at
Deerfield Academy, where Osama Khalifa (a later winner of the 2017
College Squash Association Individual title) was so far superior to
every other New England prep-schooler that he needed to have practice
games with a player of Leeuw’s level in order for his game to continue
to progress. Seif Abou Eleinen (later a member of Harvard’s 2018 Ivy
League championship team) was in a similar situation at the Brooks
School, and he also benefited greatly from his practice games with
Leeuw under the TOG aegis.
After three years in the TOG network (during which time he
actually attained his highest PSA ranking just inside the top 80),
Leeuw moved to New York to become an assistant pro at the New York
Athletic Club (NYAC), replacing his compatriot (and longtime friend and
mentor) Greg Lamude, who had decided to return to South Africa to
assume the reins at the Londt Park Squash Club in Port Elizabeth, where
he had first learned the game as a youngster. It was at the NYAC that
Leeuw first became exposed to hardball doubles, a form of the sport
that required a fairly major adjustment but one in which he eventually
excelled, initially during the several seasons in which he played with
Omar El Kashef (their best results being an advance to the final round
of a tour stop in Pittsburgh in 2018 and a round-of-16 win over the
heavily favored Robin Clarke and Zac Alexander in the 2019 Briggs Cup)
and more recently with a variety of partners, including both Anvari
(with whom Leeuw won the Gold Racquet Invitational with a final-round
win over Carl Baglio and Peter Kelly this past December), and Kyle
Martino, whom Leeuw partnered to the Silver Racquet title, defeating
Khalifa and Josh Hughes in the final, one month prior to the Gold
Racquets.
In addition to his exploits and career-high No. 14 ranking
on the SDA tour, Leeuw was also named the head professional at the NYAC
in May 2021, a little more than a year after the February 2020 passing
of Pat Canavan, who had been the head pro there for nearly 25 years.
Although by the time of his appointment Leeuw had been based at the
NYAC for seven years, there was still a challenging transition from
assistant pro to the head position, which required what he describes as
a “more global perspective,” as well as a greater awareness of the need
to anticipate contingencies (and have a plan in place to address them
if they arise) and an ability to prioritize what has to be addressed
head-on and what can be safely delegated to the trio of excellent
assistant pros (consisting of Eric Christiansen, Jaymie Haycocks and
Elani Landman) that currently comprise the NYAC pro squash staff. With
a year in the head pro position now under his belt and a best-ever SDA
ranking currently on his ledger, Leeuw is looking forward to the years
that lie ahead with confidence and anticipation.
