Women’s Pro Doubles Recap: Steph Hewitt And Dana Betts Capture Cincinnati Open By Rob Dinerman Dateline November 9th --- Dana
Betts and Steph Hewitt stormed to victory in the second annual
Cincinnati Open this weekend without the loss of a single game. After
receiving a bye to the semifinal round of the six-team draw, Betts and
Hewitt took three single-digit games over Vic Simmonds and Karen Jerome
(straight-game quarterfinal winners over Tehani Guruge and Emily
Lungstrum) to reach today’s final, where they defeated top seeds
Narelle Krizek and Tarsh McElhinny by scores of 15-14,13 and 8.
Krizek and
McElhinny had won the inaugural event of the season, the Philadelphia
Open, on the first weekend of October with a convincing four-game
final-round victory over Hewitt and Meredeth Quick in which McElhinny’s
superb front-court game had been a decisive factor. Wary of that
outcome five weeks back, Hewitt (who had emerged relatively intact
after incurring a broken nose late in the second game of the semis when
it was struck by a drive off her own partner’s bat) made sure to
cross-court lob McElhinny to the back left this time, reducing the
latter’s opportunities to shoot and forcing her to deal with the
left-handed Betts’s power-hitting and aggressive shot-making, both of
which were operating at top level this afternoon, as witness the pair
of winners she hit to rescue the first game from 13-14 (on a shallow
rail followed by a tight reverse-corner) and the several times she
passed Krizek with cross-court drives, including, most importantly, at
14-13 in the second that gave her team a two games to love lead.
McIlhinny was under much
more pressure than she had been either in the Philadelphia Open final
or in Saturday’s semifinal three-love win over Dawn Gray and Amy
Milanek (who had rallied from two games to one down to overtake
Canadians Marci Sier and Tara Mullins, 15-12 in the fifth, in Friday’s
other quarterfinal), and Krizek, rendered less able to influence the
action than she had been in last month’s event, consequently tried to
do a little too much with the opportunities that did come her way. By
midway through the third and final game, Betts and Hewitt, buoyed by
the pair of consecutive airtight tallies that by then had landed in
their column, were in full control as they sprinted through the final
stanza to the winner’s circle.
In the aftermath of the
notification just a few weeks ago by U. S. Squash that it had decided
to cancel the U. S. Open Doubles, which for months had been on the
schedule in an early-December time slot, the calendar 2014 portion of
the WDSA women’s pro doubles tour has now concluded. The tour will
resume this winter and has a very heavy schedule planned both for that
period and especially for the springtime months, with details due to be
released in the next few weeks.
