Adel Sammons Captures Hyder Women’s Crown by Rob Dinerman
Dateline May 13, 2022
--- When Adel Sammons defeated Nessrine Ariffin 11-7, 7 and 8 on May
1st to clinch first place in the 2022 Quentin Hyder Women’s Open
Division --- a match played on the portable four-wall tour court in
Grand Central Station on the first day of the Tournament of Champions
--- she joined a distinguished list of winners of this event that
includes the likes of former World No. 1 Natalie Grainger, six-time U.
S. champion Latasha Khan and U. S. Squash Hall of Fame inductee Alicia
McConnell. Her Hyder victory also signaled Sammons’s continuing
excellence as a player, even though she retired from the PSA women’s
tour in 2013 after a nine-year pro career in which she attained a World
ranking as high as No. 53 and the No. 4 national ranking in her native
South Africa.
Born Adel Weir in the city of Secunda (in the province of Mpumalanga )
in October 1983, she began playing squash at age 14, following in the
footsteps of her older brother Alwin and eventually representing
Mpumalanga at both the junior and senior levels of competition in the
interprovincial championships in Gauteng. During each of her four years
as a college student at the University of Johannesburg, the school’s
women’s squash team (on which she played in the top three throughout
that time frame) won the college team championship.
After graduating in 2005, she turned pro and moved to England to
train and take a coaching position at the Hunts County Club, where 2001
British Open finalist Tania Bailey and former World top-four Linda
Charman were based as well. After three years in England, Adel moved to
Doha, Qatar, where she was the squash coach of the girls team and
served as a fundamental-movement-skills instructor for one year
at the Aspire Academy, a government-funded school for ages K-12, before
playing full-time on the PSA circuit from 2010-13. She reached the
semifinals of the South Australia Open in 2008 and the same stage of
the Nepal Open in 2010, attaining the No. 53 spot in the PSA standings
and placing fourth in the South African National Championships in 2011.
She then coached at the Qatar National Federation before moving back to
Johannesburg to become the head squash pro at the Country Club of
Johannesburg in February 2015. She married Douglas Sammons, a former
pro squash player himself, that year, and their daughter Ava was born
in September 2016.
In 2019, the Sammons family moved to the U. S. in order for Adel
to accept a position as an assistant squash pro at the Heights Casino
Club, where the Director of Squash since 2009 has been Linda Elriani
(formerly Charman), Sammons’s longtime friend from the time they shared
at the Hunts County Club during the early 2000’s. With three
years under her belt at Heights, her game still provably at a
praiseworthy level and her daughter having reached the tractable age of
five and a half, Sammons, now 38, is looking forward to the future with
confidence and conviction.
