Gina Stoker And Suzie Pierrepont Capture Heights Casino Open By Rob Dinerman Dateline November 5, 2023
--- Trailing 1-0, 14-12, with a two-game deficit against the defending
champs and No. 1 seeds staring them in the face, Gina Stoker and Suzie
Pierrepont responded with a trio of audacious winners --- the last of
them on a Pierrepont forehand touch volley that slid just above the tin
near the right wall --- and made that reversal stick with a 7-15,
15-14, 15-8, 15-8 victory over Kayley Leonard and Maria Elena Ubina
Sunday afternoon in the final round of the 2023 SDA Heights Casino
Open. The late-game rally in the second game was the first of the
match’s two inflection points, with the other coming when Stoker and
Pierrepont erased a 6-3 deficit in the fourth game with an eight-point
run that effectively sealed the outcome and capped off a weekend of
comebacks for the Stoker/Pierrepont pairing. They had rallied from two
games to love down in their opening-round quarterfinal match against
Rachel Mashek and Jana Shiha before then winning the last seven points
from 8-12 in the first game of their semifinal en route to
a 3-0 win over second seeds Elani and Lume Landman.
Leonard and Ubina, who had motored to the final without dropping a
single game --- including in their decisive semifinal win over Haley
Mendez and Line Hansen --- were in total control throughout the first
game of the final, pulling off their usual assortment of varied
front-court winners and imposing their impressive court coverage. Even
after contributing four tins to a 5-0 Stoker/Pierrepont lead at the
outset of the second, Leonard and Ubina quickly pulled even (at 6-all)
and sharp-shot their way to leads of 13-10 and, as noted, 14-12. But
when that game got away , the momentum turned in favor of Stoker and
Pierrepont, who became more aggressive (and correspondingly more
successful) with their front-court forays and opened up some holes in
the usually perfectly-synched Leonard/Ubina defense. For the most part,
the points were fast-paced, intense and of short duration (the entire
four-game match consumed less than 45 minutes), to some degree
resulting from the topography of the host club’s court, whose famous
beam hanging well down from the ceiling picks off enough balls to make
high-lobbing an adventure and whose floor and walls tend to “hold” the
ball, making it stay low and die early. This set of factors rewards
attacking play, and , along with more than 80% of the points ending
relatively early with either winners (many of them spectacular
nick-finders) or errors, there was a number of exciting “scramble”
points (with both sets of partners covering superbly for each other)
and few conservative drawn-out exchanges.
After falling behind early in the third game and never being able to
close the gap, Leonard and Ubina appeared to show renewed determination
as they swept the first four points of the fourth. But they
uncharacteristically faded during that 8-0 mid-game slump, coughing up
a quartet of costly tins, and Stoker and Pierrepont, sensing a chance
to close out the match, fully rose to the occasion and sprinted across
the finish line. Their victory ---preceded in recent weeks by the
Leonard/Ubina triumph in the season-opening Frank Reidy Open at the
Germantown Cricket Club in suburban Philadelphia (in which they rallied
after losing the first two games of the final to Pierrepont and Nikki
Todd) and the successful title defense staged by the Landman sisters
two weeks ago (with a 3-0 final-round win over Leonard/Ubina) at the
NYC Open at the University Club of New York --- means that the first
three tournaments of the 2023-24 SDA women’s tour have been won by
three different teams. This bit of wealth-spreading has not occurred in
women’s pro doubles in more than a decade, creating an intriguing
competitive tableau coming into the next scheduled event at the
Westchester Country Club in early December four weeks hence.
