Dinerman’s
Weekend Doubles Wrap-Up: First-Time Partners Gina Stoker/Lauren West
(Philly Open) and Clinton Leeuw/Kyle Martino (Silver Racquet) Five-Game
Their Way To Victory
photo Specter Center
Dateline November 14, 2021
--- Hammered out of the gate in a 15-5 opening game whose last 10
points were all won by their opponents, and later confronted with a 6-3
deficit in the third game as well, top seeds Clinton Leeuw and Kyle
Martino responded with a 10-point streak of their own, then came
through in the end stretch of the fourth game to close out a
hard-earned 5-15, 15-9, 15-9, 15-11 victory over Josh Hughes and Osama
Khalifa in the final round of the 28th edition of the Silver Racquet
Doubles Championship, held this year as always at the Racquet &
Tennis Club in midtown Manhattan. While they were accomplishing this
feat at one of the oldest squash clubs in the country, the nation’s
newest squash club, the Specter Center in downtown Philadelphia, which
had its opening ceremony just six weeks ago, also hosted a high-level
doubles tournament, the Philly Open, the second stop this season on the
women’s pro doubles tour, in which Gina Stoker and Lauren West saved a
match ball against them in the fourth game, then raced through the
fifth to record a 15-14, 11-15, 12-15, 15-14, 15-5 final-round victory
over Amanda Sobhy and Lume Landman.
Remarkably, all four final-round pairings were first-time
partnerships --- a tribute to those team members’ ability to
extemporize and mesh quickly --- and nine of the 14 combined matches
from the quarterfinal round onwards (including all four Silver Racquet
quarterfinals) were five-gamers, two of which latter games seesawed to
simultaneous-match-point. Will Hartigan, the 2015 winner of the Silver
Racquet with Addison West, and former Harvard captain Will Ahmed,
finalists in this event the last time it was held in 2019, won the
first 15-14 fifth game of the weekend in the round of 16 over six-time
Silver Racquet champ Morris Clothier and Alex Domenick Friday night,
following which Hartigan/Ahmed saw a two-love lead dissolve into a
15-13 fifth-game loss to Hughes and Khalifa, who then won their
semifinal in a close four against second seeds Eric Bedell and Ben
Stein, five-game quarters winners over Reed Endresen and Robby Berner.
The draw’s top half was equally closely contested, with Leeuw and
Martino, who along with Bedell/Stein were byed to the quarters of this
14-team draw, being pushed to five games first by Valentin Quan and
Elroy Leong and then by Clark Doyle and B. G. Lemmon, who themselves
had survived a total of three match balls against them in their 15-14
fifth-game win over Micheal Ferreira (who won the Silver Racquet four
straight times from 2005-08) and Aashish Kamat, a match in which each
of the last three games were decided by a 15-14 tally.
Although Leeuw and Martino were thoroughly out-played in
the first game of the final, throughout which Hughes and Khalifa were
the sharper and more aggressive team, the eventual champs recovered
their form in taking the second game. But it was not until partway
through the third that they fully commandeered a level of control that
they would never completely relinquish during the remainder of this
entertaining and high-quality match. Leeuw in particular asserted
himself in the final two games, scoring with a variety of winners,
driving Hughes and Khalifa deeper into the court with his power and a
host of skid-boasts that opened up the front for himself and an
increasingly confident Martino to exploit, enabling them to run off
with that third game and take three- and four-point leads in the
fourth. However, Hughes and Khalifa determinedly hung in and staged an
admirable rally from 8-12 to 11-12 on a daring, tin-defying Khalifa
reverse-corner. But at that juncture Leeuw, frustrated at being denied
a stroke call that would have made the score 13-11, responded in the
best possible manner by hitting a trio of match-ending winners --- an
inside-out forehand roll-corner and then a deft forehand volley into
the front-left nick from mid-court, leading up to an overhead backhand
volley that he gently placed again into the front-left nick to end the
day’s action and constitute a nice complement to the Silver Racquet
crown he had previously won with Hamed Anvari in 2018.
Meanwhile, down at the Specter Center, both top-half
quarterfinals had to be resolved with a fifth game Friday evening, a
harbinger of the turbulence that lay ahead. Kayley Leonard and Maria
Elena Ubina, top-seeded by virtue of their triumphant run through the
draw of the season-opening NYC Open at the University Club of New York
two weeks earlier, found themselves down two games to love to Celia
Pashley and Madeleine Perry before escaping with a 15-13 fourth game
and racing through the 15-6 fifth. Their semifinal opponents, West and
Stoker, had needed to rally as well after losing the second and third
games of their match with Julie Cerullo and Vic Simmonds. But after
winning the fourth and fifth games in single figures, West and Stoker
then went up two games to love against Leonard and Ubina, who won a
lopsided third game but were unable to mount a second successful rally
from a two-game deficit in as many days and lost the close-out fourth
15-10.
The bottom-half quarterfinals --- Sobhy/Landman over former Penn
players Nabilla Ariffin and Jessica Davis and Suzie Pierrepont and
Narelle Krizek over Nayelly Hernandez-Walker and Alicia Rodriguez –
both were convincingly settled in straight games, but the ensuing semi
was terrific right to the end. Pierrepont and Krizek, who for several
early-twenty-teens years were the top-ranked team in women’s pro
doubles, took the first two games, following which Sobhy and Landman
had a brief but important between-games discussion that enabled them
to, in Sobhy’s words, “let go, play freely, enjoy ourselves and have
fun out there!” Liberated by this mind-set, they won the last three
games 15-6, 12 and 12.
They sure came about as close as one can to winning the final as
well, most notably late in the fourth game, which they led 14-13 before
barely yielding each of those two match balls. On the first, a Landman
forehand cross-court cleanly passed Stoker, who, however, recovered
from her initial swing-and-miss by getting just enough of her racquet
on her second swing into the back wall to keep the point going, leading
to a subsequent exchange that her team eventually won. At 14-all, West
made a tough retrieval in the front-right and countered with a winner.
The fifth game was anticlimactic, as Sobhy and Landman appeared
understandably deflated by their inability to convert their pair of
match balls, while West and Stoker, buoyed by their escape, showed a
level of energy and confidence that engulfed the court as they jumped
out to leads of 3-0, 6-2 and 12-4 and finished the match off with a
Stoker lob serve that Landman was unable to return. It capped off a
doubles weekend that was characterized by a multitude of twists and
turns at each venue --- including both eventual winners having to play
14 games in their three matches, just one below the theoretical maximum
--- and that by all odds promises an exciting rest of the men’s and
women’s 2021-22 doubles schedule in the months to follow.
