Clinton Leeuw And Jaymie Haycocks Capture 2025 Men's U.S. National Doubles Championship by Rob Dinerman
photo: Lauren McGowan
Dateline March 16, 2025---
Trailing 2-0, 11-5 and by all appearances doomed to a straight-game
defeat, New York Athletic Club (NYAC) squash pros Clinton Leeuw and
Jaymie Haycocks completely changed the match’s flow by winning eight of
the next nine points and making that reversal stick en route to a
stirring 12-15, 11-15, 15-13, 15-11, 15-7 victory over John Russell and
Steve Scharff in the final round of the Men’s Open division of the 2025
U.S. National Doubles Championships at the Maryland Club in downtown
Baltimore on the second weekend in March. In engineering one of the
greatest comebacks in the history of this venerable tournament (which
has been held ever since 1933), Leeuw and Haycocks relied on a pair of
electrifying and prolonged game-ending winning streaks, with the 10-2
burst that rescued the third game followed (after a hard-fought fourth)
by an 11-1 surge in the close-out fifth game from 4-6 to 15-7. This
outcome represented a total turnaround from what had happened in the
2024 edition of this championship, especially for Leeuw, who sustained
a medial-collateral-ligament left-knee sprain in the fourth game in the
semifinal round that was too severe for the match to continue and that
sidelined him for six weeks thereafter.
Byed to the quarterfinals of this year’s 15-team draw by virtue of
their top-seeded status, Leeuw and Haycocks --- who became doubles
partners on the Squash Doubles Association (SDA) pro tour very shortly
after Haycocks joined the NYAC pro staff (where Leeuw has been based
ever since 2014) in 2022 --- earned a pair of tough pre-final victories
over first Todd Ruth (the captain of Yale’s 2010 Ivy League
championship team) and Taylor Tutrone, and then Yash Bhargava and 2018
Intercollegiate Individuals finalist Kush Kumar. The two keys to their
comeback win over former SDA partners Russell and Scharff --- both past
winners of this championship with different partners --- were (1) the
degree to which both Leeuw (the NYAC’s head pro since 2022) and
Haycocks were virtually error-free throughout the match’s second half,
and (2) even more importantly, the manner in which they raised their
level of team defense to the point where their opponents, faced with
what had become an impenetrable wall, became demoralized and eventually
tin-prone (five of them, all semi-forced, in the last dozen points of
the fifth game, including at match-ball) down the stretch.
This outcome marked the first time in the history of this tournament
that it had been won by a pair of professional colleagues from the same
club. The fact that Leeuw and Haycocks are in their third season as
partners --- and have become one of the top-tier teams on the
formidable SDA tour --- played a major role in their advance to the
winner’s circle. Their ability to operate seamlessly as a two-man unit
--- whether covering for each other on “scramble points,” or executing
a stratagem designed to exploit an opponent’s weakness --- has resulted
in a number of recent noteworthy SDA performances, including winning an
event on their “home” NYAC court this past May and reaching the finals
of the Sleepy Hollow Open just before Thanksgiving. Their championship
run in the 2025 U.S. National Doubles leaves them perfectly positioned
coming into the remaining SDA events this spring and beyond.
Rob Dinerman is in his 25th season
playing on and writing extensively about the pro doubles tour and has
authored 18 books about squash, all of which are arrayed on the home
page of the robdinerman.com website.
