Historic Achievement As Tippett Sisters Top WDSA Pro Women's Doubles Rankings
by Rob Dinerman


Dateline July 14th --- For what is believed to be the first time in the history of squash, a pair of sisters occupy the top two spots in the season-end rankings of a professional association. Natarsha Tippett McElhinny, a former top-20 player on the women’s pro singles tour, and her younger sister Narelle Tippett Krizek are Nos. 1 and 2 respectively in the final Women’s Squash Doubles Association (WDSA) rankings for the 2014-15 season, which were published late last week. The Grinham sisters, four-time British Open champ Rachael and four-time World Open finalist Natalie, have been in the top THREE of the women's pro singles rankings together but never in the top two. Following McElhinny and Krizek in the WDSA standings and rounding out the top 10 are, sequentially, Dana Betts, Steph Hewitt, Victoria Simmonds, Suzie Pierrepont, current women’s singles top-10 and U. S. National Champion Amanda Sohhy, Meredeth Quick, Latasha Khan and Carrie Hastings.

   There were six sanctioned ranking events on this past season’s WDSA  tournament schedule --- namely the Philadelphia Open, Cincinnati Open, Turner Cup, St. Louis Open, Hashim Khan Open in Denver and John’s Island Open in Florida ---  and the rankings are calculated based on a player’s best four performances divided by four. Pierrepont, who during four of the past five years had combined with Krizek to form the tour’s No. 1 team, spent the year based in Denver pursuing  a Business School degree, which limited her to just two ranking tournaments this past season (the Turner Cup and Hashim Khan Open, with Krizek and Hewitt as her respective partners), and although she won both of those as well as the non-ranking World Doubles with her British compatriot Hastings, the fact that her point total was divided by four rather than two caused her to slide just out of the top five for the time being. She and Krizek had been entered in both the U. S. Open and the John’s Island Open, but the former event got cancelled with very little notice by U. S. Squash due to organizational and funding issues, and a disabling late-season foot injury to Krizek occurred too late for Pierrepont to find a substitute partner for the John’s Island event.

  McElhinny and Krizek, who prior to this past season had won WDSA tour stops in Denver and Los Angeles in 2012 and in St. Louis in 2014, as well as the U. S. National Doubles in 2011, partnered each other to the championship in the season-opening Philadelphia Open with a final-round victory over Quick and Hewitt, as well as to the final in Cincinnati, where they lost to Betts and Hewitt, and the semis in Denver, where they dropped a close five-gamer to Gina Stoker and Alex Clark. In addition to also joining forces with Hastings in a run to the semis of the Turner Cup, there to lose to Natalie Grainger and the Harvard-bound Greenwich Academy senior Kaylee Leonard, McElhinny also teamed up with Betts in a dramatic advance to the winner’s circle at Vero Beach, where they weathered a murderous 15-14 fifth-game quarterfinal with 2012 U. S. Open finalists Amy Gross and Alex Clark (on a stroke call against Clark on simultaneous-match-ball) and then beat Stoker/Simmonds and Sobhy/Khan in somewhat more routine though still highly competitive fashion.

    At various times, McElhinny won late-round matches playing each wall (she and her sister occasionally switch walls during their matches when they feel that a favorable match-up against certain opponents can be obtained by their doing so), a remarkable display of versatility for someone who is currently based in Oklahoma City, where she has zero access to doubles courts and only plays singles once or twice per week on a court on the Oklahoma University campus. She and her fellow top-10 ranked players have been significant members of the WDSA tour in most cases since its inception in autumn 2007, but the surge into the late rounds of a number of the draws by young players such as Sobhy, Leonard, Clark, Gross, Tehani Guruge and Fernanda Rocha was one of the more noteworthy aspects of the 2014-15 campaign and should augur well for the tour in 2015-16 and beyond.