WDSA 2010-11 Season Recap: A Half-Dozen Players Have Starring Roles While Top-Level Rivalry Emerges by Rob Dinerman
June 13, 2011 --- The Women’s Doubles Squash Association (WDSA) concluded its fourth competitive season last week in Los Angeles, its first-ever appearance on the west coast and itself a quite literal sign of the tour’s expansion, with Suzie Pierrepont and Narelle Krizek clinching their second consecutive No. 1 end-of-season team ranking with a straight-games victory over Amanda Sobhy and Latasha Khan in the final round of the inaugural $10,000 Crescent Capital LA Open, hosted by the Jonathan Club. The outcome represented the fifth WDSA title for Pierrepont and Krizek in six attempts since they became partners midway through the 2009-10 season, and their rivalry with the newly emergent Sobhy/Natalie Grainger tandem --- which thrashed Pierrepont/Krizek this past December in the Turner Cup final before that result was reversed in a five-game Players Championship final-round marathon last month, with Pierrepont/Krizek running off a 10-0 match-ending streak from 5-all --- both defined this past season and will for sure be a major theme when the 2011-12 WDSA tour kicks off next fall.
That Turner Cup competition, whose mid-town Manhattan venue and $50,000 purse, by far the biggest of any pro doubles event (including the ISDA men’s pro circuit) all season made it easily the most high-profile in WDSA history, represented the first time that Grainger (who had partnered Jess DiMauro to the No. 1 2008-09 team ranking but hadn’t played in a WDSA event in two and a half years) and the 17-year-old Harvard-bound high-school senior Sobhy had ever teamed up. Indeed, Sobhy, the reigning World Junior singles champion, was making her WDSA debut that weekend, which began a bit shakily when they dropped a game to Natarsha McElhinny and Marci Sier in the quarterfinals before they picked up steam in a straight-set semi over second seeds Steph Hewitt and Meredeth Quick.
Notwithstanding that latter result over a Quick/Hewitt pairing that had won the previous season’s Indian Summer Open and been runners-up to Krizek and Pierrepont at the Turner Cup, Players Championship and Canadian Pro events, Sobhy and Grainger entered the final as underdogs against Krizek and Pierrepont, who in the top-half semifinal had blitzed Alicia McConnell and Stephanie Edmison (quarterfinal 17-15 fifth-game winners over third seeds Emily Lungstrum and Dana Betts after trailing 11-6 and 14-11) and who mercilessly exploited the relatively doubles-inexperienced Sobhy in marching out to a commanding 14-9 lead in the first game. But Grainger, a former finalist in singles in both the British Open and World Open, and Sobhy responded with a devastating and out-of-the-blue eight-point game-ending run and never looked back, pounding this momentum to a 17-14 15-9 15-10 tally over their crestfallen opponents that completely transformed the tone of the entire season.
As noted, Krizek and Pierrepont would get their revenge four months later at the same University Club of New York site in the Players Championship via a 15-10 17-18 15-8 9-15 15-5 tally in which this time they withstood the loss of a one-point early-match game (on a delicate Grainger backhand drop shot from the back wall at 17-all in the second), showing a resolve that had been absent in the Turner Cup clash and that may have actually started one round earlier when, trailing Hewitt/Quick two games to one, Pierrepont and Krizek had come away with a 15-12 fourth game and run off with the 15-7 fifth. Their memorable ten-point dash to the trophy capped off a hectic weekend for everyone involved, especially Sobhy, who flew back Saturday night from a WISPA event she was playing in Dallas, and Krizek, who while Sobhy was traveling east was at the Maryland Club in downtown Baltimore as one of three people (Andrew Cordova and Dave Bennett were the others) who was inducted into the Maryland Squash Hall Of Fame.
It would have been nice if a rubber match between these two teams had happened this spring as a showdown that would have determined which was the best team this season, but hopefully Sobhy’s scholastic and varsity commitments as a Harvard student will not keep this dynamic pairing from adding subsequent chapters to their competition with Krizek/Pierrepont. Not that either tandem will be having a clear path to the finals of future WDSA tournaments, as this past season saw every player who participated in at least four events lose at least twice, while the multiple-tournament winners list for this season included Krizek (Players Championship, U. S. Nationals with older sister McElhinny, and LA); Pierrepont (Players Championship and LA with Krizek); Hewitt (Indian Summer Open with McElhinny over Krizek/Sier in the final, as well as the Canadian Nationals with Edmison and the biennial World Doubles with Canadian compatriot Seanna Keating over Aussies Krizek/McElhinny in the final); and, as referenced, McElhinny.
Furthermore, Lungstrum and Betts were frequent semifinalists, as were Philadelphians Amy Milanek and Dawn Gray, who in a World Doubles semi saw a 14-11 fifth-game lead over Hewitt and Keating evaporate into a 15-14 loss that preceded a Keating/Hewitt comeback from a two-games-to-love deficit in the final. Hewitt along with partner McElhinny was similarly obliged to rally at the season-opening Indian Summer event at the Commodore Squash Club in St. Paul, where they dropped the first two games to Joyce Davenport (an honoree during the Turner Cup weekend for her many decades of achievement in and contribution to the game) and Karen Jerome, who then forced a best-of-nine tiebreaker in the third before McElhinny and Hewitt swept the ensuing five straight points and, ultimately, the ensuing five straight games, including an 18-17 ending to the close-out third game of their Krizek/Sier final.
This entire group of tour veterans came away with most of the victories and (between them) all of the hardware this past season, but equally encouraging as the tour enters its milestone fifth season in the fall of 2011 were the appearances, and performances, of a host of WDSA newcomers. This substantial group includes Edmison, who also won the Canadian National singles title; the five-time U. S. singles champion Khan; Larissa Stephenson, a Turner Cup quarterfinalist with Davenport; U. S. National Mixed Doubles finalist Carrie Hastings; Fernanda Rocha, who won both the U. S. Under-30 Women’s with Stephenson and the Under-30 Mixed with Greg McArthur; and former Vassar star Shirin Kaufman. Their presence, along with that of new sites like Los Angeles, injected an element of freshness, enthusiasm and talent that undoubtedly will positively impact the WDSA tour in 2011-12 and beyond.
This first appeared on wdsatour.com
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