Amanda Sobhy, Natalie Grainger to Round Out Impressive Weekend WDSA Turner Cup Field by Rob Dinerman Dateline January 20th ----
Defending champions Narelle Krizek and Suzie Pierrepont headline an
excellent 12-team field set to compete this coming weekend in the
$20,000 Turner Cup, hosted for the second straight year by the
Westchester Country Club in Rye and benefiting Squash Haven. The first
of two qualifying rounds begin Thursday evening, 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 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 two 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, like several of the other Turner
Cup entrants, is also playing in the Tournament of Champions singles
event in mid-town Manhattan, which began earlier this week, 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 of this season’s WDSA schedule.
