Historic Achievement As Tippett Sisters Top WDSA Pro Women's Doubles Rankings by Rob Dinerman Dateline July 14th
--- For what is believed to be the first time in the history of squash,
a pair of sisters occupy the top two spots in the season-end rankings
of a professional association. Natarsha Tippett McElhinny, a former
top-20 player on the women’s pro singles tour, and her younger sister
Narelle Tippett Krizek are Nos. 1 and 2 respectively in the final
Women’s Squash Doubles Association (WDSA) rankings for the 2014-15
season, which were published late last week. The Grinham sisters,
four-time British Open champ Rachael and four-time World Open finalist
Natalie, have been in the top THREE of the women's pro singles rankings
together but never in the top two. Following McElhinny and Krizek in
the WDSA standings and rounding out the top 10 are, sequentially, Dana
Betts, Steph Hewitt, Victoria Simmonds, Suzie Pierrepont, current
women’s singles top-10 and U. S. National Champion Amanda Sohhy,
Meredeth Quick, Latasha Khan and Carrie Hastings.
There were six sanctioned ranking events on this past
season’s WDSA tournament schedule --- namely the Philadelphia
Open, Cincinnati Open, Turner Cup, St. Louis Open, Hashim Khan Open in
Denver and John’s Island Open in Florida --- and the rankings are
calculated based on a player’s best four performances divided by four.
Pierrepont, who during four of the past five years had combined with
Krizek to form the tour’s No. 1 team, spent the year based in Denver
pursuing a Business School degree, which limited her to just two
ranking tournaments this past season (the Turner Cup and Hashim Khan
Open, with Krizek and Hewitt as her respective partners), and although
she won both of those as well as the non-ranking World Doubles with her
British compatriot Hastings, the fact that her point total was divided
by four rather than two caused her to slide just out of the top five
for the time being. She and Krizek had been entered in both the U. S.
Open and the John’s Island Open, but the former event got cancelled
with very little notice by U. S. Squash due to organizational and
funding issues, and a disabling late-season foot injury to Krizek
occurred too late for Pierrepont to find a substitute partner for the
John’s Island event.
McElhinny and Krizek, who prior to this past season had won WDSA
tour stops in Denver and Los Angeles in 2012 and in St. Louis in 2014,
as well as the U. S. National Doubles in 2011, partnered each other to
the championship in the season-opening Philadelphia Open with a
final-round victory over Quick and Hewitt, as well as to the final in
Cincinnati, where they lost to Betts and Hewitt, and the semis in
Denver, where they dropped a close five-gamer to Gina Stoker and Alex
Clark. In addition to also joining forces with Hastings in a run to the
semis of the Turner Cup, there to lose to Natalie Grainger and the
Harvard-bound Greenwich Academy senior Kaylee Leonard, McElhinny also
teamed up with Betts in a dramatic advance to the winner’s circle at
Vero Beach, where they weathered a murderous 15-14 fifth-game
quarterfinal with 2012 U. S. Open finalists Amy Gross and Alex Clark
(on a stroke call against Clark on simultaneous-match-ball) and then
beat Stoker/Simmonds and Sobhy/Khan in somewhat more routine though
still highly competitive fashion.
At various times, McElhinny won late-round matches
playing each wall (she and her sister occasionally switch walls during
their matches when they feel that a favorable match-up against certain
opponents can be obtained by their doing so), a remarkable display of
versatility for someone who is currently based in Oklahoma City, where
she has zero access to doubles courts and only plays singles once or
twice per week on a court on the Oklahoma University campus. She and
her fellow top-10 ranked players have been significant members of the
WDSA tour in most cases since its inception in autumn 2007, but the
surge into the late rounds of a number of the draws by young players
such as Sobhy, Leonard, Clark, Gross, Tehani Guruge and Fernanda Rocha
was one of the more noteworthy aspects of the 2014-15 campaign and
should augur well for the tour in 2015-16 and beyond.
