Inaugural NY Squash Doubles Championship Held In Conjunction With Hyder Cup
by Rob Dinerman
Dateline May 6th ---- Trailing 14-12 in the fourth game, their seemingly safe 2-1, 10-5 lead just minutes earlier wiped out and then some by a seven-point run against them, top seeds Josh Schwartz and Hamed Anvari extricated themselves and avoided a looming fifth game with a decisive three-point run to cap off a 15-8 9-15 15-8 15-14 victory over second seeds Addison West and Dylan Patterson Sunday afternoon in the final round of the inaugural NY Squash Doubles championship, the first time that there has been a doubles competition as part of the 45th annual Quentin Hyder Cup, the longest continually running softball-singles invitational in North America and the culmination of the NY Squash 2012-13 schedule. In so doing, Schwartz and Hamed, semifinalists in the recent U. S. National Doubles in St. Louis, earned a nice companion-piece to the NYAC Invitational win they had notched two months ago in the same venue at the southwestern foot of Central Park.
Schwartz and Anvari had advanced to that stage with a pair of straight-set wins over first Morris Clothier and Rob Dinerman and then Peter Kelly and Aaron Zimmerman, quarters victors over Will Hartigan and Peter Cipriano, while in the bottom half West, who also served as Tournament Chairman, and Patterson had out-played Joe Purrazella and Zack Stern prior to a tough four-game semifinal against Alex Domenick and Chris Callis, who had defeated Terence Li (this year’s recipient of the Eddie Standing Sportsmanship Award) and Ben Oliner. The final, a rematch of an NYAC Invitational semi nine weeks ago, featured inconsistent play and alternating lengthy point spurts through the first three single-figure games, with Schwartz/Anvari racing out to 8-2 in the first game but committing a combined seven errors from 5-all that doomed their cause in the second before regaining full control of the third, which they maintained to 10-5 in the fourth. Other than their lapse in the second half of the second game, Schwartz was frustrating West by keeping his rails tight to the left wall, Anvari was scoring repeatedly with his sharp-shooting and neither Patterson nor West was able to mount a sustained stretch of high-quality play.
To their credit, however, they came up with their best performances just at that 5-10 juncture when they appeared on the verge of falling permanently out of the match. West got it started by rolling out a three-wall, following which Patterson nicked a cross-drop, West lashed a winner down the middle and suddenly they were the ones carrying the play, with their opponents tin-prone and on the defensive. West and Patterson surged to 12-10 before Anvari finally stopped the run with a volley into the front-left nick, but West and Patterson held their narrow lead and moved to 14-12 when Schwartz tinned an attempted backhand volley roll-corner. A fifth game would truly have been up for grabs in light of how streak-filled the match had been to that point, but Anvari rendered such speculation moot by scoring three consecutive match-ending winners on, sequentially, a backhand straight drop from the back wall, a forehand volleyed reverse-corner and a mid-court volley into the front-left nick that died just before a lunging West could scoop it up.
There was also a women’s tourney, consisting of two three-team round-robins whose winners then squared off in the final. Unlike the men’s final, with three one-sided games prior to a simultaneous-game-ball in the fourth, the 13-15 15-14 14-15 15-8 15-7 tally of the women’s final between eventual winners Jennifer Coxe and Toby Eyre and Eyre’s older sister Ashley and her partner, Kelly Whipple, featured three airtight games followed by a single-figure fourth and fifth. Even though they were unable to finish off the late-game lead that they held in the third game, Coxe and Toby Eyre were carrying the play by relentlessly attacking the left wall, and their resolve in staying with this approach paid off as they seized sizable cushions in the last two games and were in full control by the end.
Finals Recap:
Men: Josh Schwartz/Hamed Anvari d. Addison West/Dylan Patterson, 15-8 9-15 15-8 15-14.
Women: Jennifer Coxe/Toby Eyre d. Kelly Whipple/Ashley Eyre, 13-15 15-14 14-15 15-8 15-7.
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