Rachael&Natalie:
Grinhams make WISPA Squash History

Rachael and Natalie Grinham, sisters from Australia, exhibit different personalities on court. They both, though, exhibit superb athleticism and competitive spirit. Both have catapaulted their careers in recent months and both have won WISPA titles in the past month.

Now the two sisters have set more squash history, by historically both appearing in the world's top ten for February 2003

COLLEGE USA
Schedules
Team previews

DEPARTMENTS
Latest news
Tournament Calendar
Bronstein Global Gallery
Player of the month
Videos
History
Pakistan Squash
School Squash
Camp Index
Features Index
Player Profiles
Worldwide Clubs
Worldwide Links
Rankings
Jobs

More Good stuff:
About Squash
Just starting
Books
Juniors Squash
Women's Squash
Regional Reports

By Rob Dinerman

Little Sister Natalie advises Rachael during a break in play.

Rachael and Natalie Grinham, who early this past fall
played major roles on the Australian national team that dethroned defending champion England in the final of the 2002 World Team Championship, punctuated and arguably exceeded even that accomplishment by combining to annex three of the quartet of WISPA ranking tour events that took place in the Westchester
and southern Connecticut areas on consecutive weeks during the month of January.

In so doing, they became the first pair of sisters to both win WISPA tournaments in the 20-year history of that Association, the first sisters to become ranked in the WISPA top 10, either simultaneously or ever, and the first sisters under the aegis of any professional squash organization known to both win pro squash events since the famous Cave sisters, Janet and Nancy, did so in the 1920's.

Rachael, 26, had entered calendar 2003 with 10 WISPA World Tour titles to her credit, the seventh of which, in Kuala Lampur in February 2001, had come at the final-round expense of her younger (by 14 months) sister Natalie, who had been forced to retire from that match with an injury after amassing a two-game lead. Though she won what proved to be the key match against England's higher-ranked Stephanie Brind in that World Team Championship tournament five months ago, Natalie had been unable to attain a single WISPA final since that Kuala Lampur event and in fact had ended 2002 with three consecutive first-round straight-game losses.

By her own admission, and understandably given this inauspicious backdrop, Natalie entered the Marsh McLennon Apawamis Open in Rye, NY with no major expectations and hoping only to play as well as possible and try to generate some of the confidence she had lost during her slump this past autumn. A first-round win over qualifier Rebecca Botwright and a walkover due to a pre-match warm-up back injury to her scheduled quarter-final opponent Madeline Perry got Grinham to the semis, where she promptly fell behind top seed and World No. 3 Natalie Pohrer. At this juncture, it appeared that the third-seeded Queensland native would exit the draw on schedule, and possibly be embarrassed in the process by the formidable Pohrer, who had closed out the 2002 year by reaching the World Open final which she barely lost in a fourth-set tiebreaker to Sara Fitz-Gerald) and rocketing to victory in several consecutive subsequent autumn tournaments in Europe.

Natalie also beat Pohrer in San Francisco in 2000.
(photo © 2003 Ron Beck)

But, remarkably, Grinham saved both that 8-0 game-ball and several others, rescued the seemingly lost cause of that game 10-8 and made this shocking reversal stick by riding a hot streak and a rash of fatigue-induced Pohrer errors to a downhill 10-8 9-4 9-1 upset victory and a spot in the final. The win was reminiscent of her first win over Pohrer in San Francisco in 2000, when she came back from being down 4-8 1-2 match ball.

There she stunned second seed Rebecca Macree with a dominant 9-0 first game, split the next two, and engulfed her increasingly chippy and much larger opponent under a barrage of wonderfully placed fourth-game drop shots that left Macree (whom Grinham had heretofore never defeated) drained, demoralized and on the substantially short end of a 9-1 close-out score. It was, as noted, the first-ever WISPA tournament title for Grinham, who let
out a bellow of triumph when her powerfully pasted match-ball forehand rail landed well beyond Macree's reach, a major departure from Grinham's normally understated court demeanor but a fully understandable and even endearing reaction to the magnitude of her accomplishment.

The Forbes Open started just a few days after the Marsh McLennon final in nearby Southport, CT, just a few MetroNorth train stops north, and this time Grinham found herself at the opposite end of the giant-killing spectrum.

Rachael Reached the Commonwealth Games semis, in which she battled Sarah Fitz-Gerald.
(photo © 2003 Fritz Borchert)

Seeded No. 1 for this event, she advanced fairly comfortably to the semi-final round, but there she was almost undone by little-known qualifier Tegwen Malik, the Welshwoman who had been forced off the tour for three full years by a mystery illness and was just making her return to WISPA competition. The 27-year-old Malik amazed everybody with her pair of 3-0 main-draw wins over 2001 U. S. National champion Shabana Khan and No. 4 seed Shelley Kitchen, and when she then won a 9-5 first game and a second-game 10-8 tiebreaker from Grinham, she appeared well on her way to displacing the latter from her opportunity to bask in the Cinderella
spotlight she had earned in such compelling fashion less than a week earlier.

That Grinham had been able to conquer one of the tour's most athletically
gifted players in Pohrer and one of its most rugged competitors in Macree
was a tribute to the same tenacity that would rise to the fore at two games to
love down in her Southport semi-final match with Malik, against whom she rallied inexorably through the final three 9-2, 5 and 3 games. Once ensconced in the final against Vicky Botwright, the young British stand-out playing in her first career WISPA final, Grinham asserted her newfound final-round invincibility in a convincing four-game win (9-1 in the fourth) and thereby accomplished twice in just six days something (i.e. winning a WISPA title) she had not previously been able to do even once in eight years on the women's professional world circuit.

Rachael Dismantled Vicky Botwright in the 2003 Vassar Open this month.
(photo © 2003 Carlisle Stockton)

While Natalie Grinham was thus pocketing her pair of first-place trophies, Rachael was in the end stages of what had become a two-month recovery from a substantial back injury incurred in the semi-finals of the Grasshopper Cup in Zurich against Vanessa Atkinson, whom Grinham had defeated in five games in Brooklyn one event prior but to whom she had to default after the second game in Switzerland when the injury became too debilitating for her to continue. The mishap truncated what had been an exceptionally productive stretch for Grinham, who had won her ninth and tenth career crowns in August and September, out-playing 2002 British Open finalist and 2002 World Open finalist Pohrer in those respective finals, teaming as noted with her sister and Fitz-Gerald to win the World Team Championship for Australia, coming within a fifth-set tiebreaker against Pohrer of what would have been her first-ever semi-final berth in the World Open, pressing eventual
tournament winner Carol Owens to the brink in their U. S. Open semi and
advancing to the Zurich semi-final without losing a game.

After two months of near-complete inactivity, however, the senior Grinham arrived in Greenwich, the third leg of the Westchester-Connecticut mini-tour understandably unsure of her physical conditioning level and still wary of a recurrence of the still-healing back problem. Her confidence took an even greater hit when she first played raggedly in a four-game first-round win over Latasha Khan and then was unceremoniously ousted in the second round by the young Egyptian star Omneya Abdel Kawy, to whom Grinham had never previously lost but who on this occasion drubbed her to the tune of 9-1, 7 and 4.

Nothing seemed to go right either on or off the court for Grinham during her several days in Greenwich, which she therefore wisely exited soon after the Kawy match to prepare for the upcoming tour stop in Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY, where she was seeded No. 1.

Grinham arm-fought her way through a pair of wins over unseeded players, then defeated fourth seed Jenny Tranfield in a well-played four-game semi-final after losing the opening game 9-1. This match represented a turning point for Grinham, who discovered in mid-match to her great relief that her fitness level had sufficiently returned to allow her to cope with the long points and high pace being thrown at her by Tranfield. Unlike against Kawy, when she became fatigued and STAYED fatigued after a series of arduous points, in this match Grinham was able to recover much more quickly from a tough rally, and with the renewal of her confidence in this (crucial) element of her squash-playing persona, she began to feel better about other aspects of her game as well. It was a huge relief just to be playing well again for the first time since mid-November, whatever the outcome, which in the case of the Tranfield match turned out to be favorable as well.

Grinham fully expected a rematch with the second-seeded Atkinson in the final, but the latter lost a close four-game semi to Vicky Botwright, who had straight-gamed Fiona Geaves one round before and who therefore entered her second career WISPA final (and second in just 14 days) on a major roll.

Though she has never defeated Rachael Grinham, Botwright has always been a tough match-up for her, mostly because she holds the ball exceptionally well on open balls up front before flicking it with a deceptive delivery.

After a four-game win in a German league match several years ago, Grinham realized she had rarely if ever faced an opponent who had been able to get her going in the wrong direction so consistently. Then in Qatar in 2001, Botwright rallied from two-love down to force a fifth game, which Grinham barely eked out 9-7, and last year in Singapore they were dead even at a game apiece before Botwright injured her troublesome ankle late in the second game which so immobilized her that she lost the third and fourth games 9-0. She and Rachael were supposed to meet in Malaysia one week later, but Botwright had to pull out on the morning of the match when the ankle injury that had doomed her in the Singapore match flared up too painfully for her to go on court.

Chastened by this undefeated but shaky history, heartened by the extent to which her game had come around after the initial stumble in Greenwich and perhaps inspired as well by what Natalie had accomplished several weeks earlier, Rachael Grinham reached a peak in a dominant 9-0, 5 and 4 performance that brought her the Vassar College Class of '32 title and earned her the No. 5 WISPA ranking for the first time in her nine-year pro career.

She was playing as well as she had throughout the pre-injury fall, and a besieged Botwright was prevented from going for or making the kind of shots that had keyed her pre-final victories over Geaves and Atkinson.

Natalie's pair of tournament-winning marches earned her a career-best No. 10 WISPA ranking as well, and these family milestones constituted a praiseworthy complement to Rachael and Natalie won the 2002 World Doubles Invitational title the Grinham sisters captured last summer and the bronze medal they annexed in the doubles competition at the Commonwealth Games.

They have come an awfully long way from the small local club in Toowoomba (population 80,000, about 60 miles inland of Queensland's capital city of Brisbane), where they used to chase a ball around the floor of a vacant court starting at round age three with whatever racquet they could possibly hold while their parents John and Davina, club players (though avid ones) both, spent so much of their free time in the spartan facility that their children "pretty much grew up there," according to Rachael. And it should be remembered as well that these self-made and still emerging WISPA stars are just entering their prime years and could be on the cusp of even greater individual and family achievements for quite some time to come.

Squashtalk.com All materials © 1999-2003. Communicate with us at info@squashtalk.com.
Published by Squashtalk LLC, 95 Martha's Point Rd. Concord MA 01742 USA, Editor and Publisher Ron Beck,
Graphics editor Debra Tessier Send comments, ideas, contributions and feedback to the webmaster.
Copyright © 1999-2003 SquashTalk, all rights reserved, may not be reproduced in any form except for one-time personal use.

Rachael&Natalie: Grinhams make WISPA Squash History

Rachael&Natalie:
Grinhams make WISPA Squash History