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A Recap of the First Women's Pro Doubles Season
By Rob Dinerman, from New York    
Squashtalk Independent News; © 2008 SquashTalk LLC

A Look Back At The 2007-08 Women’s Pro Doubles Tour   By Rob Dinerman

The Women’s Doubles Squash Association (WDSA) made a remarkably praiseworthy arrival onto the professional squash season in 2007-08, featuring three sanctioned ranking events (namely Greenwich in November, Rye in February and Denver in March) and a host of highly popular and in some cases even legendary protagonists. Founded this past autumn by Narelle Krizek, herself a multiple world and national women’s and mixed doubles champion, and her husband, Rob, the Director of Racquet Sports at the Greenwich Field Club; sponsored by Harrow Sports, TCW Crescent Mezzanine and Greenwich Sports Medicine; and inspired at least to a degree by the hope of providing a counterpart to the ISDA men’s pro hardball doubles tour that has had such a successful run throughout the decade of the 2000’s, the tour (whose web site is wdsatour.com) immediately attracted the financial and emotional support of the doubles squash community and swiftly secured the membership of virtually every top women’s doubles player in the United States and Canada.

Krizek and her various partners (namely Steph Hewitt, four months’ pregnant at the time, in Greenwich, Demer Holleran in Rye, as well as in the U. S. Nationals in late March in Philadelphia, and Krizek’s sister Natarsha McElhinny in Denver) reached all four of these finals, where in each case they were opposed by WISPA No. 4 and current WISPA President Natalie Grainger and many-times Canadian National Women’s and Mixed champion Jessica DiMauro. The latter pairing (which also won the Canadian Nationals) lost only one of those finals, namely the Briggs Women’s Cup (whose $25,000 purse topped the tour), where they fell in a close four to Krizek and Holleran.

Several of those finals hinged on a couple of crucial points late in close games: especially memorable in this regard were the simultaneous-game-point in the third game in Greenwich, where Krizek, presented with an open forehand and her left-wall opponent Grainger fenced in behind her, boldly went for a shallow forehand winner which, however, rang loudly off the top of the tin; and the similarly simultaneous-game-point at the end of the third game in Philadelphia (like Greenwich at a game apiece, and like Greenwich preceding a more clear-cut close-out fourth game), in which DiMauro’s forehand cross-court directly into Krizek’s body had too much pace for the latter to fend off. Other dynamics added to the competitive drama as well, including the way teams dealt with Grainger being both the most athletically-gifted and doubles-inexperienced player on the tour (in each case by a wide margin), the numerous and variously-caused partner switches from one event to the next and, in the case of the two evenly divided Krizek/Holleran vs. Grainger/DiMauro finals, the intense positional jockeying on the right wall between DiMauro, a late-1990’s Intercollegiate star and Individuals champion at Penn, and her former college coach Holleran.

Of the other leading players, Meredeth Quick, the ’06 U. S. Mixed champion with her brother Preston and the ’07 U. S. Women’s winner with former WISPA No. 5 Fiona Geaves, reached three semifinals (in Greenwich with Karen Jerome, who had to default after one game with a season-ending lower-leg injury, and in Rye and Denver with Geaves), while Emily Lungstrum (with Dana Betts in Greenwich and with Lee Belknap in Denver) and Betts (with Lungstrum in Greenwich and current WISPA No. 38 Susie Pierrepont in Philadelphia) had two semifinal appearances each. Belknap’s twin sisters, Berkeley Revenaugh and Mary McKee, defeated their 14-months-older sibling and her Rye partner Lungstrum in an entertaining Briggs Cup quarterfinal, rallying from two games to one down in what is believed to be the first time that three sisters were on court in top-level women’s doubles competition.

Other solid North American players like ’07 Yale captain Catherine MacLeod, her Eli teammate Lauren Doline, ’95 Intercollegiate Individual champion Libby Welch, recent Harvard stand-out Audrey Duboc, Greenwich Country Club pro Marie Vlcek, Mayfair (in Toronto) Club pro Marci Sier, Fairmount (in Philadelphia) pro Orla O’Doherty  former WISPA top-40 Amy Milanek (an ‘08 Nationals semifinalist with Dawn Gray) and many-times U. S. women’s and mixed champ Joyce Davenport all made their presence felt this past season, and a number of current WISPA players are expected to join their colleagues Grainger and Pierrepont on the WDSA circuit (which hopes to expand to several additional cities) next season.

The Krizeks seem determined to follow up on the positive reaction to the initial WDSA campaign, bolstered by the sizable support their efforts received during their inaugural run, the personalities of a highly appealing player group, the wise decision to link as many events as possible with local urban squash programs (like Citysquash in the case of the Briggs Cup and Mile High with the Denver event) and the seemingly ongoing growth of doubles squash as a whole. The 2008-09 season therefore looms as a likely major proving ground, as more players join the tour and the quest for additional sites and sponsors enters an important phase in its evolution.

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