Final WDSA Season Under Narelle Krizek Leadership An Historic One By Rob Dinerman, Assisted By Joyce Davenport Dateline August 24th
--- The low-key manner in which the 2014-15 WDSA women’s pro doubles
schedule came to an end with a pair of invitational tournaments in
Southampton and Nantucket belied an exciting season in which different
pairings kept appearing in the winner’s circle, new names made a major
impact and a recent organizational realignment occurred that seems to
set the stage for a promising future.
Throughout the prior five years, the formidable Suzie
Pierrepont/Narelle Krizek duo had dominated the tour, save for the
2011-12 year in which they were momentarily displaced by Steph Hewitt
and Meredeth Quick before regaining their top perch the following
season and winning the last 10 sanctioned ranking WDSA tournaments
which they entered as a team. Pierrepont and Krizek did retain the
prestigious Turner Cup this past January --- their 14th title overall,
a WDSA record by a substantial margin and more than double the
total amassed by any other pairing --- but the fact that Pierrepont
spent the year earning a Masters degree in Business at Colorado
University in Denver, combined with the cancellation of the
early-December U. S. Open by U. S. Squash due to funding issues, as
well as the severe heel injury that Krizek incurred in the Hashim Khan
Open in late March, sidelining her for the remainder of the season, all
conspired to make the Turner Cup the only event on the 2014-15 schedule
in which Pierrepont and Krizek were able to team up.
As a result, and for the first time in the eight-year
history of the Association, at no point this past season did a single
team win two WDSA tournaments in a row. After Krizek and her sister
Tarsh McElhinny captured the season-opening early-October Philadelphia
Open with a four-game final-round win over Hewitt and Quick, they then
lost the Cincinnati Open final five weeks later to Hewitt and Dana
Betts, who conjured up two winners (on a shallow rail followed by a
tight reverse-corner) on the last two points of the 15-14 first game
and rifled a cross-court past Krizek at 14-13 in the second en route to
a 3-0 victory. Characteristic of the a-different-hero-every-week ethos
that defined the entire campaign, Betts and partner Latasha Khan were
eliminated in the first round of the late-January Turner Cup at the
hands of Vic Simmonds and WSA top-10 singles player Amanda Sobhy, who
then lost to Pierrepont/Krizek, first-round winners over qualifiers and
former WSA top-two ranked Jenny Duncalf and Rachael Grinham, a
four-time British Open champion.
In the bottom half of the draw, former WSA No. 1 Natalie
Grainger and Harvard-bound Greenwich Academy senior Kayley Leonard
trailed Amy Gross and Fernanda Rocha 11-4 in the fifth game of a
final-round qualifying match but erupted on a match-closing 11-2 run
which they followed up with a 15-11 fifth-game quarterfinal victory
over second seeds Hewitt and Quick and a 3-1 semi over McElhinny and
Carrie Hastings that was keyed by the shallow winner that Grainger was
able to summon up at 14-all in the pivotal third game. By the time
Grainger and Leonard began the Sunday final against the two-time
defending Turner Cup champs Pierrepont and Krizek, they had played a
near-maximum 18 games in their four pre-final matches (Grainger had
actually played 22, counting her highly-competitive four-game loss in
the concomitant Greenwich Open singles tourney to just-crowned
Tournament Of Champions winner Raneem El Welily), while their opponents
had played the minimum six games in their two matches. Though this
disparity likely played a role in the ensuing four-game final
(especially in a match-ending 9-1 run in which Grainger and Leonard
visibly sagged under the firepower that was levied at them), the
outcome was more a matter of the best team in women’s pro doubles
history asserting itself at crunch-time of the most significant event
of the year.
In the months that followed, Cincinnati Open winners
Hewitt and Betts were reunited in a victorious run through the St.
Louis Open (again defeating Krizek and McElhinny in the airtight though
straight-set 15-13, 14 and 13 final), following which Hewitt and
Pierrepont captured their third-straight Hashim Khan Open with a
final-round win over Gina Stoker and Alex Clark. In the John’s Island
Open in Vero Beach, McElhinny and Betts survived an opening-round
simultaneous-match-ball predicament against Gross and Clark when the
latter mis-hit a reverse-corner, causing the ball to bound directly
back at her and resulting in a stroke call. Thus reprieved, McElhinny
and Betts then out-played Stoker and Simmonds to reach the final, which
they won, 15-13 in the fourth, over Sobhy and Khan, semis winners over
Duncalf/Grinham, who had enjoyed their Turner Cup foray enough to
travel to Florida, where they shocked just-crowned Canadian National
Doubles champs Hewitt and Seanna Keating in the quarterfinals.
The presence of Sobhy (WSA No. 10), Duncalf (16) and
Grinham (14), along with Sarah-Jane Perry (12), who played in the
Turner Cup at the Westchester Country Club in Rye, and Heba El Torky
(23), who played in the Philadelphia Open, meant that no fewer than
five top-25 WSA players competed on the WDSA tour at one time or
another this season, an encouraging upward trend, as was the increased
number of Canadian players, a list that included Hewitt, Keating, Karen
Jerome, Hollie Naughton, Marci Sier and Tara Mullins.
Although Pierrepont won both ranking WDSA events in which she
played (the Turner Cup and Hashim Khan Open), as well as the mid-May
non-ranking but important biennial World Doubles in Chicago with her
English compatriot Hastings (defeating Simmonds and Stoker in an
all-British final), the fact that she only played in two ranking
tournaments, in a system that uses a minimum of four events as the
divisor, caused her to slip to No. 6, behind, in ascending order, No. 5
Simmonds, No. 4 Hewitt, No. 3 Betts (who, like Hewitt, won three WDSA
events), No. 2 Krizek and No. 1 McElhinny, whose pair each of
tournament wins (in Philadelphia and Florida) and runner-up finishes
(in Cincinnati and St. Louis) gave her just enough points to edge her
younger sibling for first place in what is believed to be the first
time in the history of squash in which a pair of sisters have occupied
the top two slots in the season-end rankings of a professional
association.
On August 17th, Krizek, who along with her husband, Rob
Krizek, had founded the WDSA in Autumn 2007, wrote an eloquent letter
to the WDSA membership in which she announced that, after eight
rewarding but exhausting years at the helm as Tour Director, she had
decided to sell the WDSA to Pierrepont, whose recently acquired MBA and
diverse squash experience as a top-30 WSA player, interim WSA Tour
Director, teaching pro in Philadelphia and Rye, and coach of the
perennial-champion Greenwich Academy varsity should leave her superbly
positioned to assume her new responsibilities. Krizek will remain on
the Board as a Player Representative to assist Pierrepont in
transitioning the WDSA to a player-run Association and to make sure
that the tour’s sponsors and tournament chairs are provided with
everything they need to ensure the success of the events on the
upcoming schedule. Certainly this change represents the end of a
praiseworthy era --- the sparse three-tournament northeastern-based
2007-08 schedule has metamorphosed into an 11-event circuit with stops
all over the United States, with an additional inaugural tournament set
to be held in Boston this winter --- but the hope and the plan is that
Pierrepont and her supporting cast can elevate the WDSA to an even
higher level in 2015-16 and the years that follow.
