WDSA Turner Cup Semis: Pierrepont/Krizek and Quick/Hewitt Charge Into Final by Rob Dinerman Dateline May 17th
--- Trailing 7-2 against a suddenly-aroused and higher-seeded opponent,
Steph Hewitt and Meredeth Quick conjured up an inexorable 9-0 run,
winning 13 of the match’s last 14 points to defeat Dana Betts and Alex
Clark 15-6, 12 and 8 this afternoon at the Westchester Country Club in
Rye in the semifinal round of the $30,000 Turner Cup, the flagship
event of the entire WDSA pro women’s doubles season. Hewitt and Quick
will now face top seeds Suzie Pierrepont and Narelle Krizek,
straight-set winners as well today (15-10, 11 and 11 over Tarsh
McElhinny and Karen Jerome), on Sunday afternoon at 2 PM in the final.
These two teams have been battling for WDSA supremacy for a number of
years now and they have split their two prior Turner Cup final-round
match-ups, with Pierrepont and Krizek winning in 2008 and Quick and
Hewitt getting their revenge in 2012. The teams clashed just last month
in the John’s Island Open in Florida, with Krizek and Pierrepont
prevailing in a close four games, which marked the eighth straight
tournament win for them, dating back to their last loss, to
Quick/Hewitt in the 2012 Turner Cup final.
Even though Pierrepont and Krizek trailed Jerome/McElhinny 9-5 in both
the second and third games today, one always had the sense that they
could cut out the errors and impose their substantially superior
weaponry whenever they needed to, as indeed turned out to be the case.
Krizek scored in any number of ways, from some nick-finding three-walls
to tight reverse-corner and shallow rails, while Pierrepont volleyed
fearlessly and effectively enough to keep their opponents scurrying to
the corners much of the time. Though the Pierrepont/Krizek duo ran off
seven straight points from 5-9 to 12-9 in closing out the third game,
they will have to play at that level of quality much more consistently
in the final if they plan on beating Quick/Hewitt, who were a model of
efficiency, both defensively and offensively, throughout their match
with first-time partners Betts and Clark. Quick was retrieving
amazingly well and she committed fewer than five tins the entire match
and Hewitt was almost her equal on both fronts and was coming up with
numerous winners as well.
Betts and Clark, trailing 1-0, 10-3, played their best squash at the
end of the second game and the beginning of the third, creeping back
from way behind to get to 12-14 in the second, in part on the strength
of two wall-hugging Betts drives that Quick couldn’t return and some
nervy corner winners off Clark’s bat. But at 12-14, Clark hit a
cross-court that foul-tipped the back wall on its way out of court, the
kind of near-miss that to some degree typified their performance all
afternoon. They did, as noted, get out to a 7-2 lead in the third game,
but a Clark tin on a reverse-corner was followed swiftly by two
front-court winners by Quick, and, just like that, a devastating 13-1
sprint to the tape was on.
Most of the points became long, all-court exchanges, high on exertion
and entertainment value and frequently evenly contested – except for
the fact that all but one of them wound up in the Quick/Hewitt column.
Between them they were covering the entire court, hitting low-risk yet
pressuring shots, committing ZERO tins, and basically giving their
opponents no place to go. Clark in particular seemed to sag in the face
of the unrelenting Quick/Hewitt attack, being forced further and
further out of position. Tomorrow’s match-up, in the most important
tournament on the WDSA schedule and featuring the two top teams on the
WDSA circuit playing for the biggest purse of the season, should be a
fitting culmination to what has been an exciting 2013-14 season.
