A Retrospective On The 2024-25 SDA Pro Doubles Tour: A Kaleidoscope Of
Champions by Rob Dinerman
Dateline May 17, 2025 --- The 2024-25 Squash Doubles Association (SDA)
pro tour --- which consisted of 20 men’s tournaments (including nine
Challenger events for players ranked out of the top 15), eight women’s
tournaments and one Mixed Doubles tournament --- was characterized from
beginning to end by a series of twists and turns, different faces in
the trophy lineup almost on a weekly basis, and successful late-match
rallies from daunting deficits to a degree that was unprecedented in
the history of the Association. This constituted an emphatic way of
marking the milestone 25th year of the existence of an official
doubles-only Association, which was formed in January 2000 as the
International Squash Doubles Association (ISDA) before undergoing a
major reorganization and renaming itself the SDA in Autumn 2012.
Thirty-five players --- 27 men and eight women --- won at least one
tournament (an all-time record with plenty of room to spare), more than
a dozen for the first time in their careers, with 16 more (14 men and
two women) reaching at least one final. This kaleidoscope of champions
was a night-and-day contrast to the five times (the last as recently as
2017-18) when one team (Manek Mathur and Damien Mudge that year) went
undefeated throughout an entire season. Other than when James Stout and
Scott Arnold strung together a trio of consecutive mid-winter
tournament wins --- in Boston, Greenwich and Brooklyn --- en route to
their tour-leading total of four overall, there was only one other
men’s pairing (namely James Bamber and Zac Alexander) that won even two
tournaments in 2024-25.
Furthermore there were six occasions (five of them in finals) in which
the eventual tournament winner trailed two games to love, as was also
the case in the finals of the non-ranking U.S. National Doubles, in
which Clinton Leeuw and Jaymie Haycocks rallied from 2-0, 11-5 down to
overtake John Russell and Steve Scharff. Three times the eventual
champions had to fend off at least one match-ball against them and
there were an amazing 17 times (nine of them in finals) in which the
tournament winners had to survive at least one five-game match on their
path to the winner’s circle.
RIGHT FROM THE START
Several of these phenomena presented themselves right from the
mid-September start of the schedule --- in which Maria Elena Ubina and
Kayley Leonard survived a fourth-game match-ball against them in the
final round of the Philadelphia Open against Gina Stoker and Lauren
West that ended on a Leonard backhand drop shot to the front right that
a stretched-out West got her racquet on but barely clipped the top of
the tin --- and continued unrelentingly through every one of the
eight months that followed until the last ball was struck on the second
weekend in May. On September’s final weekend --- one of several
sprinkled throughout the season that featured two tour stops, Matthew
Henderson and Adam Bews rallied from two-love down against Ashley
Davies and Bamber in the finals of the RC Pro Series at the Racquet
Club of St. Louis, while Yash Bhargava and Kush Kumar were doing the
same in their Westchester Country Club Challenger final with Greg Crane
and Ryan Mullaney.
One week after that pair of same-weekend final-round rallies several
thousand miles apart, first-time partners David Letourneau and John
White saved a total of eight match balls against them (two in the
fourth game and from 9-14 in the fifth) to defeat Sam Fenwick and Chris
Longman in the semis of the Maryland Club Open Challenger and rode that
momentum to a 3-0 final-round win over Davies and Lockie Munro. Later
that month, at the 20th edition of the Big Apple Open (hosted as always
by the New York Athletic Club), Osama Khalifa and Kyle Martino
weathered a five-game Big Apple Open semifinal challenge from Josh
Hughes and Tor Christoffersen and edged Bamber and Zac Alexander, 15-13
in the fourth, in the final, while just a few blocks southeast the NYC
Open final between Kayley/Ubina and Stoker/West (representing a rematch
of the Philadelphia Open final five weeks earlier) was contested at the
University Club of New York. This time Ubina and Leonard won the first
two games, only to wind up in a fifth game that seesawed hair-raisingly
to a simultaneous-championship-point, on which Stoker, who had Leonard
stuck in mid-court on her right hip, nailed a backhand drive to perfect
length down the left wall that died in back, leaving Leonard with
nothing to swing at.
SEVENTY-NINE SECONDS
On November’s opening weekend, the Heights Casino Open came down to
another final-round rematch when Leonard and Ubina attempted to avenge
their straight-game loss in the finals of the early-October Maryland
Club Open (which had a women’s draw for the first time) to Stoker and
Nikki Todd. The sequel was substantively defined by the 14-all
point in the second game, a thrilling 79-second, 49-hit marathon in
which Ubina made three “emergency retrievals,” the last of which,
however, left her so close to the front wall that when Stoker then
rifled a drive directly at Ubina, her attempted return shot skyward and
clattered against the ceiling. This gave Todd and Stoker a two games to
love lead, and in the second half of the close-out third game they
pulled away from 8-all to complete their 15-8, 14 and 10 victory. In
the one remaining pre-Thanksgiving tournament, the men’s Sleepy Hollow
Open, Leeuw and Haycocks out-lasted first-time partners Michael
Ferreira and Cam Pilley in five games in the quarters and Hughes and
Lucas Rousselet,15-13 in the fourth, in the semis. Hughes and Rousselet
had been the beneficiaries of a walkover when their scheduled
top-seeded opponents Khalifa and Chris Callis had to default due to a
back injury that Callis incurred during their round-of-16 match that
got much worse overnight.
Haycocks and Leeuw lost their subsequent final to Bamber and Alexander,
who then triumphed in the mid-December biennial CitySquash Briggs Cup
at the Apawamis Club in Rye, NY with a final-round victory over Pilley,
the host club’s head pro, and Ferreira. Although the final was a fairly
straightforward four-gamer, there was tremendous drama in both semis.
First, Khalifa and a fully-recovered Callis nearly closed out
Alexander/Bamber, who barely eked out a 15-13 fourth game to force a
fifth that ended after only 10 evenly divided points when Khalifa
sprained his right ankle at the end of a long all-court exchange so
severely that he was unable to continue and in fact was sidelined for
the next two months. Then, in the bottom-half semi, defending Briggs
Cup champions Stout and Arnold, making their season debut as partners
at this relatively late juncture, saw a 2-1, 14-10 advantage yield to a
five-point Ferreira/Pilley spurt in which Ferreira contributed four
winners, the last when he drove a backhand cross-court directly into
the front-right nick. The fifth game went to 14-all as well (with
Stout/Arnold this time rallying from 11-14), and Ferreira again
accounted for the decider, a shallow backhand reverse-corner that even
Stout, quite possibly the tour’s best retriever, was unable to track
down.
The Briggs Cup women’s event was won by Leonard (returning to her
squash stomping ground as a member of Apawamis’s vaunted junior
program) and Ubina, who rebounded from their trio of autumn final-round
losses and successfully defended their 2022 title with a 3-0
final-round victory over Suzie Pierrepont and Line Hansen, five-game
semis winners over Katie Tutrone and Jess Davis. In the only other
December SDA tour stop, the Squash House Challenger at the Greenwich
Water Club, Haycocks and his fellow English compatriot Phil Barker
surmounted a 2-1, 9-7 semifinal deficit to overtake top seeds Andrew
Muran and Calvin McCafferty and then emerged victorious from a
four-game final against Fenwick and Travis Judson.
When the tour resumed in mid-January following a month-long
Christmas/New Year’s Day hiatus, Leonard and Ubina consolidated
their Briggs Cup win with a triumphant performance at the University
Club of Boston, although they lost the first two games of their
quarterfinal match with Fernanda Rocha (the crowd favorite due to her
many years on the host club’s pro staff) and Steph Hewitt before
winning the next three in single figures. Their final-round opponents,
West and Stoker, were pushed to a fifth game in their semi with Briggs
Cup finalists Pierrepont and Hansen but stormed through the first game
of the final 15-1 and barely lost the second 15-13. The teams then
split the next two games before Leonard and Ubina took the fifth 15-12.
In the men’s draw, Ferreira and Pilley arm-fought their way through a
pair of close matches (15-13 in the fifth vs. Callis and Colin West and
15-13 in the fourth over Hughes/Christoffersen) to a final-round
rematch of their memorable Briggs Cup semifinal with Stout and Arnold,
who this time eked out the first game 15-14 (on a forehand
reverse-corner winner off Arnold’s racquet) en route to a four-game
victory.
Stout and Arnold then captured both the late-January North American
Open and the mid-February David C. Johnson Memorial in Brooklyn
Heights, in each case prevailing over Alexander and Bamber in the
finals, although the latter match required a fifth game. It marked
Stout’s fifth consecutive Johnson crown, and the third time he had
annexed this venerable championship with Arnold as his partner (the two
exceptions being Stout’s wins with Yvain Badan in 2020 and Bamber in
2023). The women’s North American Open witnessed upsets in both
semifinal matches: Leonard/Ubina sustained their only pre-final loss of
the season when Tutrone and Hansen out-played them 3-1 (winning both
the first and third games 15-14) and Todd partnered her Canadian
compatriot Jaime Minerson first to a 3-2 win over Stoker and West and
then to four-game victory in the finals as well. Making the
Todd/Minerson accomplishment all the more remarkable were (1)
that they were teaming up for only the second time (having lost in the
first round of the 2019 Briggs Cup in their only previous joint foray),
and (2) the fact that this was Todd’s first -ever SDA event playing the
left wall.
Although Stout and Arnold appeared to have built up too much momentum
with their Boston/Greenwich/Brooklyn trilogy for anyone to repulse,
they surprisingly were ousted in the quarterfinal round of the next
men’s event, the Hashim Khan Championships at the Denver Athletic Club,
where the Canadian pair of Cole Osborne and Justin Todd (Nikki’s older
brother), just a little over a month removed from having annexed the
Pittsburgh Challenger title --- by winning the last four points after
trailing Carl Baglio and Tristan Eysele 14-11 in the close-out fourth
game --- pulled off perhaps the biggest upset victory of the season
when Arnold tinned a forehand drive on simultaneous-match-point.
Osborne and Todd then lost their semifinal to Hughes/Christoffersen,
who, after dropping the first game of the final vs. first-time partners
Pilley and Khalifa, led 14-12 in the second before succumbing to an
11-0 Khalifa/Pilley surge that sealed the outcome.
AN UNPRECEDENTED DEMONSTRATION OF SQUASH VERSATILITY
Both the U.S. and Canadian National Doubles Championships were held (in
Baltimore and Toronto respectively) three weeks apart in March, and
each event had a unique element. As noted, NYAC pro colleagues Leeuw
and Haycocks staged a back-from-the-dead rally --- keyed by runs of
10-2 to rescue the third game and 11-1 to close out the 15-7 fifth ---
after Russell and Scharff had amassed a 2-0, 11-5 lead in the finals at
the Maryland Club, and the Canadian National Doubles witnessed an
unprecedented demonstration of squash versatility when Diego Elias, the
reigning World Open singles champion, teamed up with Robin Clarke to
defeat former ISDA superstar Gary Waite and Peter Reiko (who led two
games to one) in the semis and Henderson and Jackson Kay in the final.
Their victory represented the seventh Canadian National Doubles crown
for Clarke --- five of them with Arnold, with whom Clarke formed one of
the best teams on the SDA tour throughout the second half of the
twenty-teens --- while Elias, who was making his competitive debut in
hardball doubles but who was exposed to the sport during the several
years in which he was based on Toronto, became the first squash player
ever to win both a World Open and a national doubles championship (let
alone to hold both distinctions at once). The U.S. National Doubles
women’s event was won by Stoker and West (via a 15-14 fourth-game
final-round squeaker over Tutrone and Meredeth Quick), while Todd and
Jackie Moss captured the Canadian women’s tournament, defeating 2011
World Doubles champs Hewitt and Seanna Keating in the finals.
Leeuw and Haycocks staged another comeback win from two-love down
(their second in less than a month) in the early-April Tavern Club Open
in downtown Cleveland (which used the 11-point scoring system rather
than 15), this time in the semifinal round against Russell and
Henderson, who came within two points of winning the 12-10 fourth game
before Haycocks and Leeuw asserted themselves in the 11-6 fifth. The
balancing semi between Davies/Bamber (teaming up for the first time
since their run to the St. Louis finals a little more than six months
earlier) and Khamal Cumberbatch and Sergio Martin also went to a fifth
game, following which the victorious Davies/Bamber duo surged past
Leeuw and Haycocks in a four-game final.
A POWERFUL EXAMPLE
The early-April R&TC Open at the Racquet & Tennis Club featured
perhaps the most prominent feel-good moment of the entire campaign. At
this same majestic mid-town Manhattan venue one year earlier, Callis
and Khalifa (both members of the host club) had clinched the 2023-24
tour’s No. 1 end-of-season team ranking by winning a riveting final
against Stout and Arnold, their foremost rival that season for top
honors. However, an almost conspiratorial sequence of contingencies and
setbacks --- ranging from Callis’s early-season back injury to
Khalifa’s severe ankle sprain to, most seriously of all, a mid-winter
testicular cancer diagnosis that had forced Callis to undergo surgery
to remove the tumor and then endure a round of chemotherapy --- had
limited them to two tournament appearances (Sleepy Hollow and the
Briggs Cup) through March that, as noted, in both cases had resulted in
mid-tournament defaults. Thankfully by the time the R&TC event
occurred Callis had been declared completely cured and cleared to
return to competitive play.
Buoyed by this development, albeit with his bald head still a visible
reminder of the tribulations he had recently navigated, Callis rejoined
Khalifa in a no-games-lost march to a final-round encounter with
Alexander and Bamber, who had similarly dominated their half of the
draw, in the first meeting of these two elite pairings since their
truncated Briggs Cup semi nearly four months earlier. Alexander and
Bamber won each of the first two games (the second when Callis tinned a
backhand volley at 14-all), even though Bamber --- in a feat of
adaptability and athleticism that is remarkable in its own right ---
had to race down the hall to the pro shop after the first game to grab
a new pair of shoes that differed in both brand and size (switching
from a Salming 9.5 to an Asics 10) from his worn-out original pair. But
Callis and Khalifa, benefiting both from an adjusted game plan (keeping
Alexander deeper after he had sharp-shot his way through the first two
games) and improved execution, rebounded to win the next two games and,
after trailing 9-5 and later 11-9 in the fifth, they executed a 6-1
match-ending run, hitting three untouchable winners --- a nick-finding
Khalifa backhand cross-court drop shot, a forehand reverse-corner that
Callis knifed into the front-left-wall crack and a well-disguised
extremely shallow Khalifa backhand straight-drop --- from 12-all. After
everything that Khalifa and Callis, both individually and as a team,
had gone through practically from the outset of the season, their joint
achievement against such a formidable adversary was a powerful example
of perseverance and dedication.
Later that month, Quick and Pierrepont won the last women’s tournament
of the season, the LocalWorld Open at the Jonathan Club in Los Angeles,
defeating Tutrone and Davis in a four-game final. It was Pierrepont’s
second tournament win of the season, preceded by her mid-October
victory with Bews at the Onwentsia Country Club in suburban Chicago in
the only Mixed Doubles event on the schedule. The men’s tour ended in
May with Stout and Arnold overcoming a two-games-to-love deficit
against Henderson and Bews in the Buffalo Club Open, followed by a pair
of mid-month Challenger events in which Daelum Mawji and Charles
Culhane triumphed at the New York Athletic Club and Fenwick and
Longman, after losing the first two games of their opening-round match
against Ricky Weisskopf and Richard Dodd, led throughout the next three
games and wound up defeating White and Hameed Ahmed in a four-game
final at the Philadelphia Country Club.
The tour-leading quartet of tournaments that Stout and Arnold won were
enough for them to clinch the No. 1 end-of-season team ranking, ahead
of second-place Alexander and Bamber, who, by reaching at least the
finals of all six tournaments they entered (and winning two of those
finals) were the tour’s most consistent team. Bamber advanced to a
tour-leading eight finals --- the six with Alexander and two more (St.
Louis and Cleveland) with Davies. Stout also won the non-ranking but
highly competitive Silver Racquet Invitational in early November with
Morris Clothier, a result made even more impressive in light of (1) the
three five-gamers they had to play (the last of them in the final
against Brian Leonard and Elroy Leong); (2) the respective milestone
birthdays (Clothier’s 60th in September, Stout’s 40th one month
earlier) that each had recently attained; and (3) the fact that
Clothier’s record sixth and last Silver Racquets title had occurred
(with Ferreira as his partner) in 2006, 18 years earlier.
Osama Khalifa was the only player to win an SDA event this past season
with three different partners (Martino at the Big Apple Open, Pilley in
Denver and Callis at the R&TC Open). Remarkably, the eight men’s
Challenger events were won by 14 different players, just two short of
the theoretical maximum 16, with Kumar (Westchester Country Club with
Bhargava and the mid-April Creek Challenger Cup in Long Island with
Andrew Muran) and Mawji (the early-February UCNY event at the
University Club of New York with Devin McLaughlin and the NYAC
Challenger with Culhane) the only double-winners. Both Kumar’s partners
Bhargava and McLaughlin were making their debuts on the SDA tour, as
was also the case with the Kay brothers, Jackson and Josh, who won the
inaugural Cricket Club Challenger event in Toronto in mid-October,
defeating Baglio and James Kacergis in the final.
FOUR IN A ROW
By reaching six finals --- winning three of them --- and sustaining
only one pre-finals loss, Kayley Leonard and Maria Elena Ubina attained
the No. 1 end-of-season women’s team ranking for the fourth consecutive
year. In addition to reaching five finals (and winning three of them)
with her partners Nikki Todd and Lauren West, Gina Stoker annexed both
the U.S. National Doubles with West and the U.S. National Mixed Doubles
(for the third time in the past four years) with White, while Nikki
Todd and Jaime Minerson co-authored perhaps the most noteworthy result
of the entire women’s season with their run to the North American Open
crown. Todd augmented her trio of SDA titles (with Stoker in both
Maryland and Brooklyn and Minerson in Greenwich) by partnering Jackie
Moss to the Canadian National Doubles title, and she was the only
player, man or woman, to win SDA events this past season playing both
walls. The unprecedented number of comeback wins, in many cases erasing
truly imposing deficits, combined with the refreshingly frequent
emergence of successful new teams, made for one of the most exciting
SDA seasons in many years, which can only augur well for what awaits in
the 2025-26 SDA Tour and beyond.
Rob Dinerman has played on and been the major writer for the pro
doubles tour throughout the 25-year period from 2000-2025. He has
written 18 books about squash, all of which are arrayed on the home
page of the robdinerman.com website.
