Adham Madi And Marwan Tarek Capture SDA Season-Opening R&TC Challenger Crown by Rob Dinerman
R&TC Challenger Champions Adham Madi and Marwan Tarek,
Racquet & Tennis Head Squash And Rackets Professional James Stout,
Games Committee Member Liam Cullman, Finalists George Crowne and
William Kuhn
Dateline September 16, 2015
--- The men’s portion of the 2025-26 SDA Tour got off to a spectacular
start in the wake of a riveting four-game victory this past Monday
evening by first-time partners Adham Madi and Marwan Tarek over George
Crowne and William Kuhn in the final round of the inaugural R&TC
Challenger tournament at the Racquet & Tennis Club in midtown
Manhattan in a match that was so much closer than the 15-11, 11-15,
15-9, 15-10 score. In rising superior to an impressive 14-team field,
Madi and Tarek became the first all-Egyptian doubles pairing to win an
SDA ranking tournament, an accomplishment that was remarkable for both
players, but especially so for Tarek, the 2018 British Open Junior
champion, for whom this tournament represented not only a season debut but a doubles career debut.
Although he had had an extraordinary college career at Harvard ---
capturing the 2020 Individual championship, winning the deciding match
at No. 1 in Harvard’s 5-4 triumph over Trinity College in the final
round of the 2023 national men’s team championship and receiving that
year’s John Skillman Award, the highest honor bestowed on a men’s
college player --- Tarek had never even played doubles until Madi recruited him to do so early this past summer.
The pair appeared to be headed for a quarterfinal exit when, after
leading Rahul Sehrawat and James Wyatt (both of whom had been Madi’s
teammates on Columbia’s 2018 Ivy League championship squad) two games
to love, they lost the next two games and fell behind 10-4 and later
12-9 in the fifth. But Madi and Tarek then won five straight points and
escaped with that game 15-13 when Tarek lashed a forehand drive to
perfect length past Wyatt down the right wall on the final exchange.
Buoyed by this narrow escape, Madi and Tarek then split the first two
games of their semifinal match against second seeds Yash Bhargava and
Aghishek Agarwal --- quarterfinal winners over recent Yale teammates
Maxwell Orr and Merritt Wurts, who themselves had edged Senen Ubina and
Devin McLaughlin, 15-14 in the fifth, in the round-of-16 --- and eked
out the 15-13 third en route to their eventual four-game advance to the
final.
Crowne, a finalist in the 2023 college Individual championship, and his
Canadian compatriot and contemporary Kuhn similarly encountered major
difficulty in successfully navigating their way through the top half of
the draw. They had also been pushed to a fifth game in their
quarterfinal match against Reed Endresen and Josh Hollings and then
found themselves only two points from defeat in their semi against No.
1 seeds Chris Walker and James Kacergis, who had won the last three
points of the 15-14 third game and rallied from 8-12 to 13-all in the
fourth. At that juncture Kacergis, who had been mostly error-free
throughout the match, tinned a backhand drive on what would have been a
clear winner with the left side of the court wide open. Walker then
tinned an early-point forehand reverse-corner, following which Crowne
and Kuhn ended the match with an 8-0 run from 7-8 in the fifth game.
The final was extremely high-quality all the way through. Although
there was plenty of blasting away and spectacularly athletic
retrieving, all four players also evinced a degree of creativity and
imaginative shot-selection that belied the fact that all of them are
still in their 20’s and hence very early in their SDA careers. Tarek in
particular made full use of the upper third of the court and the host
club’s notably high ceiling, and he and Crowne --- who ironically as
college seniors in 2022-23 had been co-captains and the respective Nos.
1 and 2 players on Crimson teams that won the national team
championship throughout their four years --- spent much of the match
engaged in a gripping cross-court battle replete with skid-boasts,
lobs, power drives and cross-drops. Kuhn was constantly in attack mode,
while Madi presented the most complete arsenal and accounted for the
most winners of the quartet. He and Tarek maintained a slight but
definite edge for most of the match, to the extent that Crowne and Kuhn
each had to conjure up their best sustained squash of the night in
winning the second game.
Although they couldn’t quite maintain that standard in the third game
and were battling from slightly behind through much of the fourth, they
still managed to knot the score at 10-all, with the match therefore
still very much in the balance. However, on the ensuing point Madi
reflex-volleyed a daring and nick-finding backhand cross-drop that was
followed in swift succession by a Crowne tin; an off-balance mishit
Tarek volley that trickled just above the tin; a stroke call against
Crowne when he lashed a backhand drive back at himself; and a Madi
backhand roll-corner winner that closed it out. Of the 13 matches that
were played in this tournament, only two (both in the round-of-16) were
settled in the three-game minimum and four went to a fifth game. Six of
the 14 games that the eventual champions Madi and Tarek played in their
three pre-final matches were decided by two points or less, and both
finalists were two points from losing prior to the finals. All of it
made for an exceedingly entertaining and competitive kick-off to the
2025-26 SDA campaign, with tour stops in Minnesota (this coming
weekend) and Baltimore (in early October) due to follow in the next few
weeks.
