The Demer Holleran/Alicia McConnell Partnership
by Rob Dinerman
April 18, 2002 -One
exudes the frisky energy of a hyperactive puppy, while the other
maintains an on-court tranquillity that belies her hatred of defeat,
which she has said she finds a more galvanizing motivation than joy in
victory, perhaps because she has experienced the latter so
overwhelmingly often over the past 20 years.
One has fine racquetwork but has always relied primarily on her
extraordinary athleticism, while the other moves deceptively well and
can hit hard but is better known for her incredible touch and
immaculate stroke production. One is extroverted and engaging, while
the other is circumspect, thoughtful and understated. One has at
various points put her squash career on hold for extended stretches
while pursuing other sports like tennis, field hockey and lacrosse,
while the other has concentrated solely on squash since her teenage
years began. One once entered the court on Halloween night for a
tournament match clad in a full-body orange-and-black costume, while
the other always appears in classic all-white tennis apparel. Alicia
McConnell, the first-referenced in all of the above contrasts, and
Demer Holleran, the two greatest American woman squash players in the
history of the game, are one-time rivals turned doubles partners who
late last month won the USSRA Women's National Doubles title without
coming close to losing a single game.
This was the seventh consecutive year in which they won this
tournament, shattering the previous record of four set by Carol
Thesieres and Joyce Davenport from 1979-82, and the ease with which
they cruised past youngsters Meredith Quick and Dana Betts (Class of
2001 alumnae from Princeton and Bowdoin respectively) in the semis and
veterans Karen Jerome and Jessie Chai in a very straightforward final
points up the dominance they currently enjoy and makes it difficult to
believe that they were pressed to a fifth game by the Jerome-Chai
pairing in last year's version of this event.
HOLLERAN'S AMERICAN LEGACY
Holleran, who won the '94 Women's Doubles with Berkeley Belknap before
beginning her partnership with McConnell two years later, also teamed
up in early April with fellow former Princetonian contemporary Keen
Butcher to regain the USSRA Mixed Doubles Open crown which they had won
throughout the record seven-year period from 1994-2000 before being
dethroned by Gary Waite and Chai last year. In addition to this septet
each of consecutive National Women's and Mixed Doubles titles, she has
won a host of junior, intercollegiate, hardball and softball national
titles, making her by far the most decorated non-age-group woman's
champion in the history of American squash, and she showed her
versatility by also coaching the women's varsity at the University Of
Pennsylvania to their first-ever Intercollegiate Team championship in
2000.
The daughter of a former Harvard captain and older sister of her
successor as Intercollegiate Singles champion, she has been steeped in
a family tradition of excellence in racquet sports that has influenced
her approach since she was a small child.
McCONNELL - HOLLERAN'S PREDECESSOR
McConnell was never driven by any family precedent in competitive
athletics, but early in her teenage years she became involved in the
famed junior program at the Heights Casino club, located just a few
blocks away from her Pierrepoint Avenue home under the tutelage of Fred
and Carol Weymuller in the mid-1970's, and her exceptional athletic
gifts quickly marked her as a prodigy.
At age 17, she defeated her Finnish contemporary Katja Sauerwald in the
final of the World Junior Individual championship while also leading a
U. S. team that included her older sister Patrice (later dubbed "the
best captain I ever had" by legendary Princeton women's squash coach
Betty Constable) to the Junior Team Championship. By the end of that
1979-80 season, McConnell had reached her first Open final, the Boodles
Squash World Cup Round-Robin, where she lost to just-crowned USSRA
Champion Barbara Maltby, whose edge in experience and mental toughness
would enable her to defeat McConnell in the Boodles and Nationals
finals the following season as well, when she was still a high-school
student at Loyola High.
But during the 1981-82 season, when McConnell was a freshman at Penn,
Maltby retired to racquetball and doubles, and McConnell swept through
the women's schedule, winning the first of her five straight Boodles
Opens (later changed to the Chivas Regal Open) in November, the first
of her seven straight Carol Weymuller Invitationals at her home club in
December, the first of her record seven consecutive USSRA National
hardball titles in February and the first of her three straight
Intercollegiate Individual crowns in March.
McConnell almost certainly would have emulated her '82 and '85
Nationals final-round victim Gail Ramsay in winning this latter tourney
all four of her college years had she not turned pro during her senior
year, which rendered her ineligible for that year's competition---but
whether she would have been able to extend her run of seven hardball
Nationals had she not stopped playing in that event after the 1987-88
season will never be answered. After surviving five-game scares in both
the semi-final and final rounds of the '86 event at the University Club
of New York against Nina Porter (who led two games to love and took the
third game to a tiebreaker) and the British born Sue Cogswell (her
chief hardball rival for two mid-1980's seasons, during which she won
five of their 12 matches), McConnell then won her sixth and seventh
championships in Philadelphia and Denver respectively, both via
four-game final-round wins over Holleran, an underclassman at Princeton
at the time, who was increasingly emerging as the biggest threat to the
dominance McConnell had enjoyed for more than a half-dozen seasons.
ALICIA - SOFTBALL TRAILBLAZER
The following season, 1988-89, McConnell, who had been increasingly
faced with balancing WSPAsoftball pro events in Europe with hardball
events in the USA, decided to focus on the softball pro tour and passed
up further hardball competition, including that year's Nationals, which
took place at Jadwin Gymnasium, Holleran's home turf. McConnell's
abdication of the title left the field to Holleran, who mowed four
outclassed opponents down without losing a single game, then did the
same several weeks later in culminating her sparkling college career by
capturing her third Individual Intercollegiate title.
Although McConnell occasionally dabbled with squash singles in between
her pursuits first of a pro tennis career and later on the WISPA pro
women's softball circuit, her decision not to make a serious return to
the hardball game unfortunately meant that USA squash aficionados did
not get the enjoyment of witnessing what would have been a riveting
rivalry with Holleran, who cruised to six consecutive USSRA hardball
crowns, one short of McDonnell's total, which Holleran assuredly would
have surpassed had the Women's Hardball Nationals not ceased after the
1993-94 season when, as noted, Holleran captured both the USSRA Singles
and Doubles crowns, a parlay no woman had accomplished since Gretchen
Spruance did so 17 years before, in 1976-77.
McConnell, who first played on the senior U. S. Women's teams as early
as 1983, maintained her presence on these prestigious biennial squads
all the way through 1996, when she badly rolled her ankle during a
World Team Championships competition in Malaysia and returned home on
crutches.
TOUR CAREER STILL THE BENCHMARK
Though the injury healed in a little more than a month's time, she then
decided to no longer compete in softball, partly because since '93 she
had been the head pro at the Heights Casino club that had been her
squash stomping ground, partly because lower back problems had by then
become a lingering condition and partly because, at age 33 and with
nearly 20 years of competitive squash behind her, she had had her fill
of the grueling singles game.
McConnell's record in softball is still unmatched by any American
woman. She reached an all-time best (for an American) world softball
ranking of 14 (achieved in May 1988, the year she decided to focus on
softball) while competing with the likes of Susan Devoy, Michelle
Martin (against whom she scored two wins), Lucy Souter, Danielle Drady
and other famous figures of the women's softball game.
By the time, McConnell hung up her softball racquet for good, she was a
few months removed from the '96 U.S. women's doubles title that she and
Holleran had won for the first time the previous spring, when they
dethroned the '95 champs Joyce Davenport and Julie Harris, who had also
teamed with Ramsay to win the '91 and '92 versions of this event.
Holleran had lost with her younger sister Jenny to Harris and Ramsay in
'91 and with Lolly Gillen in the '92 final, when they had
straight-gamed Dawn Friedly and Jody Law in the semis, only to lose to
this pair in their rematch in the '93 final, following which Gillen
underwent reconstructive knee surgery. Holleran played the '94 Women's
Nationals with '91 Intercollegiate champion Berkeley Belknap, whose
twin sister Mary had been a teammate on the '89 Princeton squad, and
they defeated defeated Harris and a toothache-plagued Davenport in a
close five-game final.
UNBEATABLE PARTNERSHIP BEGINS
Unfortunately, the following spring the Pan Am Games was scheduled at
the same time as the National Doubles, and with McConnell, Holleran and
Belknap all playing in South America, Davenport and Harris surmounted a
somewhat diluted field, the ageless 53-year-old Davenport's record
ninth title with three different partners and Harris's third. Wary of
how formidable and savvy a pairing these two veterans were, and with
Belknap by this time relocated to the West Coast, Holleran successfully
recruited her erstwhile singles rival McConnell, who had never played
in this event since one semi-frivolous foray as a teenager more than a
decade earlier.
As noted, McConnell had always evinced a restless curiosity and a
tendency to seek new athletic challenges, even during her lengthy time
at the top of the women's game. She sometimes seemed bored with her
dominance, which is why Cogswell's brief but sturdy challenge was such
a godsend for those two years before a serious hip injury incurred in a
freak subway accident abruptly removed her from the competitive scene.
McConnell had over the years pursued not only squash and tennis, but
also field hockey, lacrosse, basketball and break-dancing, and had
excelled at all of them. When the call came from Holleran to play in
the '96 National Doubles, she was only too eager to take on another
adventure and the new life to her squash career that it represented.
The '96 win was consolidated in a final-round rematch one year later,
which was followed in a '98 final over Chai and Phoebe Trubowitz and by
a successive pair of final-round wins first over the Belknap twins,
Mary and Berkeley, in '99 and 2000 and then over Chai and Jerome during
the last two years.
Only the aforementioned 2001 final in Portland required a fifth game,
and the dominant 15-6, 15-6 fashion with which they responded to the
rare two games to one deficit confronting them on that occasion
suggests that misplaced concentration had at least as much to do with
that circumstance as anything else.
TEAM COMPLEMENTARY SKILLS
Their firepower, both offensively and defensively, is simply much more
than any other team has been able to handle throughout this seven-year
(and counting) run. In classic doubles fashion, McConnell supplies
enough pace from her right-wall position to force defensive responses
and lots of open court, which Holleran's host of delicate front-court
placements invariably exploit. McConnell seems to revel in the
athleticism the considerable expanse of a doubles court elicits, and
she frequently crosses over to cover short balls in her partner's
territory, almost as if she has an appetite to hit the ball that cannot
be slaked merely with balls hit to her region of the court. Holleran,
by contrast, scores in quieter fashion, operating less like a kid let
loose in a candy store and more like an expert but dispassionate
surgeon, or perhaps like a dinner guest discreetly pocketing her host's
best silverware, though that latter analogy should not occlude
Holleran's well-deserved reputation as the fairest of competitors.
Demer Considers Her Future Directions
Both women have shown great respect for each other in their years as a
doubles team. McConnell seems to keep much better control of her
occasionally wander-prone concentration in doubles than she ever did
during her singles career, partly no doubt from the maturing effect of
the years but also clearly out of a sense of obligation to her partner.
When Holleran injured her foot during the 2000 Mixed Doubles event in
the Worlds competition in Philadelphia, she was forced to withdraw from
the Women's event, leaving McConnell stranded and unable to win with
the substitute partner she grabbed at the last minute. Mindful of the
ramifications of that mishap, Holleran has decided this year to only
play in the Women's event next week so as not to risk a recurrence of
the unfortunate situation that arose two years ago.
'97 OPPONENTS
The one time they played against each other in doubles during this
period was in McConnell's only participation in the USSRA Mixed Doubles
in '97, when she teamed with Eric Vlcek against Holleran and Butcher,
who defeated them in a somewhat contentious four-game match marked by a
physical battle for positioning between the two women on the right
wall, especially in the pivotal and very close second game after Vlcek
and McConnell had easily taken the first. McConnell had been playing
brilliantly early on, and her distress both at this contact and
especially at a referee's decision upholding an extraordinary Holleran
retrieval of an apparently point-winning McConnell reverse-corner on a
crucial point late in that game caused a rare tempestuous outburst
followed by a noticeable accompanying drop in her level of play during
the third and final fourth games, both of which Butcher and Holleran
won convincingly to seal another in their run of titles in this
specialized competitive realm.
Though there does not seem to be any lingering rancor from that one
confrontation, what happened that day, combined with the dominance they
showed in this year's Women's Doubles, does make one wonder what would
happen if and when they split up as a team and continue with other
partners.
WHAT'S NEXT?
It is probably the most compelling sign of the greatness each has long
since realized in their intertwined competitive careers that the most
exciting matches that potentially lie ahead of them, and the highest
sense of fulfillment each can attain in what remains of their doubles
careers, might require their playing AGAINST rather than with each
other and thereby transferring to the doubles arena the rivalry that
ended almost before it really began in singles, more than a decade ago.
Whether such a substantial adjustment is in the cards obviously remains
to be seen.
Holleran displayed a degree of heroism in her and Butcher's most recent
USSRA Mixed triumph that she was never forced to attain in the Women's
event when Butcher pulled a calf muscle late in their quarterfinal
match. This mishap and the marked reduction in Butcher's mobility that
it created forced Holleran to cover all of her injured partner's
back-court territory as well as the entire right wall in subsequent
wins over a pair of outstanding alignments, the Portland-based team of
Trubowitz and Tony Catalan, against whom they went from 6-6 to 14-6,
15-8 in the fifth game of the semis after letting a match-point
opportunity slip away in the fourth, and Doug Lifford and Chai in the
final, which they won in a competitive four.
Holleran's versatility in playing the right wall as brilliantly in this
tournament as she had played the left wall two weeks earlier in the
Women's event is another sign of the grandeur of her game, as were the
host of winners she hit in the crucial moments from all sectors of the
court and the way she rose to conquer the exigencies posed by her
partner's injury. Her combined total of 27 total USSRA Open titles
(eight Doubles, eight Mixed Doubles, six hardball and five softball) is
way ahead of anyone else's, male or female, while McConnell's tally of
15 (seven Doubles, seven hardball, one softball) trails only
Holleran's. Whatever their considerable differences in style and
personality, the excellence both have attained in all disciplines of
squash has been their most salient shared characteristic, and one that
they seem likely to continue to display for many victorious seasons to
come.