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2002-03 ISDA SCHEDULE FEATURES NEW SITES

By Rob Dinerman, Sept 17 2002 © 2002 reproduction prohibited

Wary of standing pat even with a schedule that has more than doubled, a player pool that has nearly tripled and a prize money allotment that has quadrupled in just the past two years, the International Squash Doubles Association (ISDA) has announced the addition of several new events during the forthcoming 2002-2003 season.

VANCOUVER FANFARE
First of these will be a $20,000 ranking event in Vancouver on the third
weekend of October, which will be the second ranking tournament of the season
and will occur three weeks after the traditional season-opening tourney at the Denver Club, which has been renamed the Monticello Open, though the 13
entered teams will still compete for the Hamil Cup, which for each of its first three years has gone to Gary Waite (who also won the concomitant hardball singles event each of those years) and Damien Mudge.

The Vancouver event will be a multi-flight extravaganza highlighted of course by the ISDA Doubles but also offering an array of doubles and softball singles amateur and age-group flights spread out over a number of Vancouver clubs (including the Vancouver Lawn and the Evergreen Clubs) but headquartered at the Hollyburn Club. The official charity is the Child's Charity, which is dedicated to helping children who suffer from Crohn's disease and other inflammatory bowel diseases like ulcerative colitis, which are surprisingly prevalent among children and teenagers and often require aggressive treatments like prednisone and other steroids.

This is the first ISDA ranking event in Vancouver in the Association's four-year history, and it will also be the first such event that is directly associated with a major charity, as several WPSA events were with the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation back in its heyday in the 1980's.

SAN FRANCISCO FUN
In addition to Vancouver, the ISDA office also announced the confirmation
of ranking $20,000 events in Montreal on December 7-8 and in San Francisco on
May 9-11. The Montreal tournament will be hosted at the former Montreal
Badminton and Squash Club, which was recently renamed Club Atwater, while the San Francisco site will be the University Club of San Francisco, which
selected this mid-spring date in order to give it time to assure completion of the major renovation currently under way leading to the opening of two sterling gallery doubles courts, which are scheduled to be ready sometime in late February.

The return to the professional hardball squash scene of the beautiful city of Montreal is a welcome development, as 11 years have now passed since the MAAA held its last of a long run of annual WPSA events in November of '91. The fact that two young Canadian ISDA stars, namely Viktor Berg and Josh McDonald, recently moved from Toronto to Montreal and will be playing out of Club Atwater adds to the anticipation and enthusiasm that will attend this tournament, which fills the December void in last year's ISDA schedule.

As for San Francisco, it would be difficult to envision an esthetically more pleasing venue to end what promises to be a challenging and strenuous season. The rare occasions when this special city has hosted a major squash event, as it did a WPSA tourney in '81 and the USSRA Nationals two years later, it has always been a resounding success and coincidentally have provided a springboard to seminal moments for the sport: Mark Talbott, then a 20-year-old WPSA rookie without portfolio, upset Clive Caldwell and Stu Goldstein in reaching the semis in '81and presage his first-ever tournament win in Washington one week later and the nonpareil career that would follow, and Kenton Jernigan rallied from a 10-4 fifth-game semi-final deficit against Gil Mateer to win that match and go on to the first of his three consecutive Nationals in '83.

There will likely be other additions to the ISDA schedule as well, including possibly an international competition reminiscent of the USA-Canada-Mexico Loews Cup that had such a successful run for a half-dozen years on the WPSA tour in the mid-1980's, though none of these are yet confirmed. Squashtalk will provide full coverage of the entire ISDA season, with updates, player and team profiles and day-by-day reports once the tour begins in Denver on the final weekend of September.

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