DVD - pro matches
DVD - instructional
HiTec Shoes
PRINCE Racquet Lineup
Also in SquashTalk eStore:
   Squash Racquets
   Shoes
   Videos - DVDs
   Books etc

Imran Khan and Bill Doyle Win Phila. Title
By Rob Dinerman, Mar 23, 2008    
Squashtalk Independent News; © 2008 SquashTalk LLC

And Other Recent Philly Events

Sidelined virtually this entire season after undergoing micro-fracture surgery in his lower leg this past autumn, Imran Khan announced his return to the top-tier competitive ranks this past week when he teamed up with Bill Doyle to win the Philadelphia Squash Racquets Association (PSRA) Doubles tourney with a 15-12 15-10 14-17 15-13 final-round victory over Trevor McGuinness and Tom Harrity. Khan and Doyle, first-time partners who defeated former PSRA doubles winners Geordie Lemmon and Jamie Heldring in the semis while McGuinness and Harrity were doing the same to David Page and Gil Mateer, saw a 14-10 third-game lead (four championship-points) disappear under a slew of McGuinness winners that keyed a 7-0 run to rescue that game, but they regained the initiative in the fourth and maintained a small lead all the way to the finish line.

This PSRA regional competition (whose women’s open was won by William White Open winners Demer Holleran and Margaret Rux over Amy Milanek and Dawn Gray in the final) capped off what has been a busy month and a half on the doubles front in Philadelphia, the host city this coming weekend of the U. S. National Doubles, which will be headquartered at the Fairmount Athletic Club, Holleran’s spectacular new facility located in King of Prussia. As was true in the third game of the PSRA final, many of the final-round matches have featured noteworthy eleventh-hour rallies, beginning with the early-February Philly Boast event, in which Beau Buford and Geoff Kennedy, after being forced to a fifth game against Duncan Pearson and Steve Gregg in the semis, trailed top seeds Rob Whitehouse (head pro of the host Philadelphia Racquet Club) and Greg Park two games to one and eventually 12-8 in the fifth before a 6-0 rally got them to 14-12 and then 15-13 when Kennedy hit a shallow forehand winner on the second match-ball.

Kennedy and Harrity would be involved in two other five-game Philadelphia-area finals during the past few weeks as well, first as teammates when they led Pearson and Park 2-0, 4-0 in the Philadelphia Racquet Club championship only to lose both that early-third-game advantage and the remainder of the match under the determined pressure of their much-younger foes, and then as opponents in the Merion Cricket Club championship, when Harrity and McGuinness won the third game 15-3 against Kennedy/Buford and led 10-6 in the fourth but lost that game by one point on a Buford forehand winner, which fueled his team’s single-figure victory in the decisive though anticlimactic fifth game, a reversal for the McGuinness/Harrity duo that possibly had some carry-over effect when they faced Khan and Doyle in the PSRA final just four days afterwards.

Harrity’s busy winter in this his first full season after missing much of the 2006-07 campaign due to a September ’06 left Achilles tendon rupture in the Merion tennis club championship final (which he and nephew Todd Harrity nevertheless wound up winning!) also featured a runner-up finish (to Eric Pearson) in the Merion-hosted U. S. Hardball Nationals and victory with Kat Van Blarcom in the Merion Mixed. Doyle’s productive year, highlighted by his and Alan Grant’s advance to the William White final and this PSRA title with Khan, also included a successful qualifying foray with Grant in the ISDA Wilmington tourney and a finalist finish 10 days ago in a local-pro event at the Germantown club, where he and Gavin Jones defeated Grant and host pro Doug Whittaker 3-0 (but with two one-point games) in the semis before facing Buck Rogers and Adam Hamill in the final.

The latter team, which had survived a 15-14 fifth-game semi of their own against ’05 40-and-over U. S. champs Ed Chilton and Andrew Slater, then engaged Jones/Doyle in a wildly fluctuating final in which Jones and Doyle, after dropping the opening two games, led 13-0 in the third game, which they unsurprisingly won, and 9-0 in the fourth, which they very surprisingly LOST, 17-14. Doyle later ruefully noted that the points were coming almost too easily as they built up such an enormous lead, costing them their edge and leaving them unprepared to fend off the ensuing Rogers/Hamill charge, which ended when they hit three winners to sweep through the best-of-five tiebreaker session.

NEW ... Get the New Jonathon Power Instruction Video at the SquashTalk eStore!

\

Squashtalk.com All materials © 1999-2008. Communicate with us at info@squashtalk.com.
Published by Squashtalk LLC, PO Box 2918, Acton, MA 01720 USA, Editor and Publisher Ron Beck,
Graphics editor Debra Tessier, Pro editor Martin Bronstein, Doubles editor Rob Dinerman.
Send comments, ideas, contributions and feedback to the webmaster. Copyright © 1999-2008 SquashTalk, all rights reserved, may not be reproduced in any form except for one-time personal use
Squashtalk.com must always be explicitly credited.