Hyder Trophy Postponed
May 1, 2004 by Rob Dinerman, SquashTalk Independent News Service © 2004 

36TH RUNNING OF FAMOUS EVENT PUT OFF TILL JUNE

Dr. Hyder with Shahier Razik in last year's event. Photo © 2004 Debra Tessier

The MSRA Board Of Governors has been forced to postpone the 2004 Questin Hyder Trophy Squash Tournament, the oldest continually running softball event in the entire country, from its original May 7-9 weekend to the weekend of June 4-6 due to insufficient entries. This will put the event in direct competition with the new west coast Orange County PSA Event

The WISPA women's professional tournament will go on as planned during the original May weekend, but all amateur draws and the men's pro draw have been pushed back those four weeks, with a new entry deadline of May 24th, in order to allow time for a more fully subscribed tournament. As of this week, barely more than 30 amateurs had entered the more than a dozen flights offered by the tournament, and the Committee understandably felt that the event could not go forward with such a paltry number of participants.

Nothing like this has ever befallen this popular tournament during any of its 35 prior editions. The well-respected British-born Dr. Hyder, a former MSRA Board of Governors member for many years, initiated the tournament in the early 1970's on the hardball courts of his New York Athletic Club to introduce the softball game, which at the time was rarely played in the United States, which had very few international-sized courts. The event grew from there, as of course did the international game, which had pretty much displaced hardball as the game of choice in this country by the mid-1990's.

ONE OF SEVERAL USA 2004 EVENTS WITH ANEMIC ENTRIES
The need to postpone a tournament of this venerability and historical standing is therefore highly surprising, though it does further a trend of low-entry tournaments that has definitely emerged throughout the current 2003-2004 season. The recent U. S. National Doubles and World Doubles events were characterized by entries that were small enough to necessitate round-robins in a large majority of the various flights, though the exorbitant entry fees in both cases ($175 for the Nationals, $175 for the World Mixed and $250 for the World Doubles) were definitely a major part of the reason in each of those cases. The women's National Doubles had the irreducibly small number of two teams, both of which therefore played each other in a first-round final. So did several flights in the Worlds, which also had only three teams in other flights.

But one of the women's U. S. team selection events had only three entrants, the other one had but six, and the third, scheduled for early next month, might even have to be cancelled. Even the women's Nationals had only nine players and the men's draws for this event and the team selection tourneys have been disappointingly small as well.

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