WDSA Turner Cup Attracts Impressive Field by Rob Dinerman Dateline January 14th ----
Defending champions Narelle Krizek and Suzie Pierrepont headline an
excellent 12-team field set to compete on the weekend of January 23-25
in the $20,000 Turner Cup, hosted for the second straight year by the
Westchester Country Club and benefiting Squash Haven. Play begins
Thursday evening with the first of two qualifying rounds, with the
second qualifying matches Friday morning and the quarterfinals later on
Friday, to be followed by the semis late Saturday afternoon and the
final at 1 PM on Sunday, with several pro-am flights taking place
throughout the weekend.
Krizek and Pierrepont have won 13 WDSA sanctioned
ranking tournaments over the last six years, the most of any team in
the Association’s history, including the last nine events they have
entered dating back to their last loss, which occurred in May 2012 in
the final of the that season’s Turner Cup at the hands of Meredeth
Quick and Steph Hewitt. The latter duo, which won the U. S. National
Doubles and the U. S. Open in 2012, as well as the season-ending Wilson
Cup this past July, reached the final of last season’s Turner Cup and
are seeded second in this year’s event. The pair of third/fourth seeds
are both first-time pairings, consisting of Carrie Hastings/Tarsh
McElhinny and Dana Betts/Latasha Khan. Betts, who underwent successful
hip surgery to repair a torn labrum last spring, teamed up with Sarah
West to take the William White tournament at the Merion Cricket Club
earlier this month after previously partnering Hewitt to the WDSA
Cincinnati Open title in November. There they won a straight-set final
over McElhinny and Krizek, who had taken the WDSA season-opening
Philadelphia Open in early October with a four-game final-round win
over Hewitt and Quick.
The other two main-draw teams will be the veteran
Philadelphians Amy Milanek and Dawn Gray along with Amanda Sobhy and
Victoria Simmonds. Sobhy, the Harvard senior and reigning three-time
Intercollegiate Individuals champion, who, like several of the other
Turner Cup entrants, is also playing in the Tournament of Champions
singles event in mid-town Manhattan, and would therefore be facing an
extremely full playing schedule on Friday if she makes it to the
singles final, which will be played at 6 PM that night, four hours
after she and Simmonds are scheduled to play their first-round Turner
Cup match against Betts and Khan!
Natalie Grainger, who teamed up with Sobhy to capture the 2013 World
Doubles, and who along with Jess DiMauro formed the No. 1 ranked team
in the early years of the WDSA tour, will be entered in the qualifying
with Greenwich Academy No. 1 player Kaylee Leonard, who had partnered
up with Pierrepont in a run to the semis of the U. S. National Doubles
last spring. The qualifying draw is further enlivened by the presence
of a number of WSA pro singles players --- including four-time British
Open champ Rachael Grinham, two-time Carol Weymuller Open winner Jenny
Duncalf and their WSA colleagues Sarah-Jane Perry, Hollie Naughton and
Aisling Blake --- who are playing in either the Tournament of
Champions, the Harrow Invitational (which will be held just after the
Tournament of Champions concludes in several of the Greenwich clubs),
or both. The seeded teams in the Turner Cup qualifying are Tehani
Guruge (a finalist along with Pierrepont at this past summer’s Wilson
Cup) and the ageless Canadian Karen Jerome in one bracket, and Amy
Gross, a U. S. Open finalist last December along with Alex Clarke, and
former Trinity College star Fernanda Rocha in the other. It promises to
be an exciting weekend and a dramatic way to launch the calendar 2015
portion to this season’s WDSA schedule.
