Essam the Player to Beat      [FINAL DRAW - Essam drops out]

The sixth annual Treddy Ketcham Invitational, featuring as always 16-man 6.0 and 5.5 flights and hosted by the Yale Club Of New York, is set to get underway tomorrow evening, launching a busy squash month in mid-town Manhattan, given the upcoming Tournament Of Champions right across the street in Grand Central Station, which begins just a few days after the Ketcham Sunday final.

“The Treddy” was founded in 2003 by John Musto, who has served as Tournament Chairman throughout its existence, as a softball counterpart to the hardball Yale Club Invitational, which had such a successful 20-year run from 1978-97, during which time its champions roster included WPSA top-10 players Kenton Jernigan, Tom Page, Rob Dinerman and Rob Hill, Intercollegiate champions Adrian Ezra, Jernigan and Victor Wagner, four-time U. S. National Doubles winner Gil Mateer and two-time New York State champion Glenn Greenberg, who captured the inaugural edition in a fifth-set tiebreaker final over Ned Edwards, one of a number of elite players (WPSA top-five’s John Nimick, Greg Zaff and Jeff Stanley were others) to compete in this event on multiple occasions without ever winning it.

Musto’s goal was to revive both an annual invitational at the Yale Club after its late 1990’s/early 2000’s six-year hiatus and, more broadly, to help generate an invitational circuit for the softball game to replace the series of popular eastern-corridor hardball invitationals at the Trenton, Rockaway Hunting and Merion Cricket Clubs, as well as the Harvard Club Of New York and the Resorts International Hotel in Atlantic City that for decades comprised the hardball amateur season leading up to the Nationals.

Realizing that almost none of those events were making the mid/late-1990’s transition to the softball game, and that the amateur/open invitational circuit was pretty much drying up, Musto, with the strong support of the Yale Club (in the form of cocktails/meals, tournament shirts, no entry fees and the supplying of free rooms in the club for out-of-town contestants), started the tournament, which he named in honor of William Tredwell Ketcham, Yale ’41, the long-time President of the Friends Of Yale Squash, the alumni fundraising association, and a popular presence on the Yale and New York squash scene right up until his death in July 2006 at the age of 86.

Like its hardball predecessor a quarter-century earlier, the Treddy got off to a rousing start, with three-time (in ’94, ’97 and ’01) S. L. Green finalist Richard Chin earning a two games to love lead over Tim Wyant in the final only to be painstakingly overtaken during the final three exhausting and highly entertaining games. The following year’s event was highlighted by another comeback victory, this time in the semis, where Yale junior Josh Schwartz rallied from 2-1 down to out-last second seed (and ’96 Intercollegiate champion) Dan Ezra, an accomplishment which, preceding as it did his subsequent 3-0 final-round sweep over Andrew Merrill one day later, enabled Schwartz to emphatically redeem his experience on the same court one year earlier, when he suffered a hamstring pull in an early-round match that not only forced him to default but recurred often enough during the ensuing months to sabotage the rest of his season and possibly play a role in the several 5-4 team losses that befell the Yale varsity on which Schwartz was an important member.

CHIN A MAINSTAY
The ’05 tourney saw Chin make another advance to the final, which again went the full five games and in which the fifth game again failed to land in his column, even though by that stage Chin had exhausted his opponent, former Trinity star Jonny Smith, enough to force the latter to resort to go-for-broke nick attempts, just enough of which found the mark during the final few crucial points to account for a riveting 9-7 win. Smith reached the final the following year as well, but this time former PSA top-50 Mark Heather had too much weaponry for him and swept decisively to the winner’s circle. Last year, one of Smith’s mid-2000’s Trinity teammates, namely Reggie Schonborn, rose superior to the rest of the field, including Chin, whom Schonborn out-played in the final.

MOUSTAFA ESSAM FIRST SEED
This year’s 6.0 field will be headed in the seedings by Moustafa Essam, once one of the world’s top juniors (he was seeded third in the ’02 World Junior Championships and played No. 1 on the strong Egyptian junior squad that year) and well known for his shot-making skills and creativity. Challenging Essam for supremacy this weekend will be a number of solid metropolitan-area players, as well as several collegians from the Yale and Trinity rosters. Squashtalk will be covering the tournament in full, with updates throughout the weekend and a summarizing report early next week.