WDSA Season Recap: Pierrepont And Krizek Regain Their No. 1 Standing  
by Rob Dinerman

Dateline August 6th --- Motivated by having been dislodged during the 2011-12 season from the No. 1 position in professional women’s doubles that they had held throughout the prior two years, Suzie Pierrepont and Narelle Krizek responded with a compelling season-long 2012-13 performance in which they won all four of the tournaments they entered and reclaimed in convincing fashion the top spot on the WDSA tour. From the season-opening tournament, the Philadelphia Open in mid-October, where they solidly out-played their previous year’s nemesis (and conquerors in the 2011 Philadelphia Open and 2012 Turner Cup finals) Steph Hewitt and Meredeth Quick 15-12, 8 and 10 in the final, to the season-ending Wilson Cup eight months later, which they successfully defended with a four-game final-round win over Hewitt and Dana Betts (with tournament wins in John’s Island and Chicago in between, in each case at the final-round expense of 2013 U. S. National Doubles winners Betts and Hewitt), Krizek and Pierrepont complemented each other flawlessly, fought through a series of tough tiebreakers where they had faltered one year before, and upped their overall tournaments-won total to nine, the most of any twosome in the six-year history of the Association.

   Krizek also teamed with Paul Price to win the World Mixed Doubles title in April, defeating Natalie Grainger and Preston Quick, 15-13 in the fourth, in the final, while Pierrepont, who for the second straight year was runner-up with Greg McArthur in the U. S. Mixed Doubles (they led 2010 U. S. Mixed champs Grainger and Steve Scharff two-love before being overtaken), also won the Hashim Khan Open in Denver with first-time partner Hewitt (who had just won the Canadian Mixed Doubles with Scott Stoneburgh), defeating Krizek and her sister Tarsh McElhinny in the final. The siblings were finalists as well at the U. S. Open in Wilmington, where they lost to Hewitt and Meredeth Quick in an early-December match-up that represented the last salvo of the season for the pregnant Quick.

  But while top-tier players like Krizek, Pierrepont, Quick, Hewitt, Betts and McElhinny all made, as noted, multiple appearances in the final round of sanctioned tournaments on the WDSA schedule, this past season was noteworthy as well for the number of times in which unheralded teams advanced to the semifinal round, in most cases by pulling off an unexpected win and/or reversing the outcome of previous losses. The power-hitting Amanda Sobhy --- the current Intercollegiate Individual singles champion and a budding star on the WSA women’s singles circuit who with her partner Grainger swept to the 2013 World Doubles Women’s title in April --- and Latasha Khan, finalists at the 2011 Los Angeles Open in their only prior appearance together, trailed Alex Clark and Kat Grant, 14-12 in the fifth in the inaugural John’s Island tourney before a 5-1 match-saving run to 17-15 and a berth in the semis; Karen Jerome and Kelsey Engman led Betts and Emily Lungstrum two games to love at the U. S. Open and took the third game to a best-of-five tiebreaker before Betts and Lungstrum eventually won in five, but both Clark and Jerome redeemed those respective disappointing defeats when they partnered each other to a solid Wilson Cup quarterfinal win over Lungstrum and McElhinny.

   Heidi Mather, brand-new this season to the WDSA scene (and a U. S. National Doubles finalist with Sarah West) and the ageless Joyce Davenport earned their way to the semis in Chicago by defeating Dawn Gray and Carrie Hastings, who with her regular partner Tina Rix had late-season breakthrough wins first at the World Doubles, where they defeated fourth seeds Betts and Lungstrum in the quarters in what may have been the foremost upset win of the entire season; then in a straight-game quarterfinal win in John’s Island over Lungstrum and McElhinny; and finally a few months later at the Wilson Cup, where they rose superior to the Philadelphia veterans Gray and Amy Milanek, who had always handled them in the past, including earlier this past season at the Philadelphia Open --- an excellent three-part spring/summer surge for the young British pair which quite possibly could carry over into next season. These ascendant players and teams, as well as a number of emerging sites and an extremely positive and supportive attitude presented by the WDSA membership that is picked up on and appreciated by the sponsors, spectators and pro-am participants at virtually every event, are driving the growth of the WDSA, and the degree to which they can challenge the established tandems at the top may well constitute the story-line of the 2013-14 WDSA campaign.

   Major sponsors of the 2012-13 tour included Patrick Turner, Scott Wilson with Morgan Stanley Private Wealth Management, Christine DeRose with RBC Wealth Management DeRose/Krantz Group, Talmage LLC, Saratoga Partners, Chrome Capital Management, Harrow Sports, Patricia Han and the Pierce Family. In addition, nearly every sanctioned tournament on this past year’s schedule was linked with a significant charity, namely the Philadelphia Open with the Abramson Cancer Center; the Hashim Khan with Mile High Squash; Chicago with MetroSquash; the Wilson Cup with Southampton Youth Services; and the U. S. Open and World Doubles events with Urban Doubles U. S. Squash.

   Finally it is worth noting that the tour --- featuring as it did ranking stops in the south, the Midwest, the Rocky Mountains and the northeastern corridor, as well as exhibitions at the Baltimore Country Club, the Cincinnati Country Club and in Colorado Springs --- hit more different sectors of the United States this past season than at any other time in WDSA history, and there are signs of even greater expansion to follow next season and thereafter.