Damian Walker and Shabana Khan both won their quarter-final matches yesterday in the 2002 United States Squash Championships, hosted at the Brady Squash Center in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium at Yale University in New Haven, CT.

#1 Seed Damian Walker vs John Musto

DEFENDERS CHALLENGE
Each will attempt to further their defense of the titles they won in 2001 in the semis this afternoon, with the finals scheduled for tomorrow. With one exception, both the Men's Open, known as the S. L. Green in honor of New York real estate magnate Stephen Green, who a decade ago established and funded the trust that generates the $20,000 annual purse, and the Women's Open will have the top four seeds competing in today's semis, as this has been pretty much a totem-pole tournament to this juncture.

The 32-year-old Walker, who lost the 2000 final to Marty Clark before winning last year's final in five over Richard Chin, defeated Dartmouth freshman and No. 1 Ryan Donegan 9-0, 3 and 2 to reach last night's quarters, where he faced former Yalie John Musto, who was returning to the site of his intercollegiate glory a decade earlier and where, a decade before THAT, his squash career had begun. Musto's metamorphosis constituted a graphic testimony to the speed and unrelenting nature of time's inexorably onward march. It seems so short a time ago when he was an undersized child hanging around the Yale courts hoping to pick up a game or lesson before or after classes at his nearby grade school.

MUSTO AT HOME COURT
Fast forward a few frames and one can find him spearheading Yale's first national college championship in 29 years and, as a senior, facing Hector Barragan in the final of the '91 USSRA Hardball Nationals, hosted at what was then the Knox Exhibition Court, the centerpiece of Yale's massive court renovation. Fast forward a few frames more to the present to Yale's now hardball-court-less facility and see Musto, now the second-oldest player in the 19-man draw, taking on and being whitewashed 9-0 in the first game by the defending champion and heavily-favored British-born Walker, who after capturing the 2001 S.L. Green crown had dominated the Team Trials last summer(four matches, the minimum 12 games), played No. 1 for the U.S. team entry in the World Team Championships in Australia last fall and blasted through both the Trinity Open and the Westchester Classic without losing a game in either case.

Though Walker's control of both the ball and the play was subjecting Musto to the lion's share of the running, the latter did rally in the second game, taking in fact an 8-4 lead, serving three times at game-ball and playing at a much higher level than he had even in his first-round four-game win over Scotland native Steve Polli, the Burlington, Vermont resident and oldest entrant in the draw, whose attempt to reverse his Westchester Classic loss to Musto one month earlier terminated with an unsuccessful fourth-set tiebreaker.

Walker's recent run of tourney wins over his American counterparts has been keyed by the several occasions on which he has faced and surmounted multiple game-ball predicaments, and that happy faculty came to the fore in his trio of "saves" in his second game with Musto, which he won 10-8. Any player hoping to defeat Walker must be able to cash in those precious and hard-to-earn game-ball opportunities, as Dave McNeely, Tim Wyant, Richard Chin, Beau River, Pete Karlen and now Musto have all failed to do, and when Walker had emerged with that second game, the 9-5 match-ending chapter that followed was fairly predictable.

#2 Seed David McNeely(foreground) vs Jason Jewell

So were the advances to the semis of McNeely and Quick, the second and third seeds respectively, who have both swept through a pair of matches without dropping more than four points in any game and who will be facing eachother this afternoon. Quick's victims have been mid-1990's star Jack Wyant and recently-crowned USSRA under-19 Champion Julian Illingworth (who had won in four over Harvard No. 3 Dylan Patterson), while McNeely, Walker's co-finalist in the Westchester Classic six weeks ago, advanced to today's action by overwhelming Josh Miller and Wyant's former Tiger teammate Jason Jewell, who had previously won 10-8 in the fourth over the seventh-seeded River.

McNeely had seen a 2-0, 5-0 advantage dissolve into a five game defeat the last time he and Quick met, in the Trinity Open quarters a little more than two months ago, and had lost to him in a PSA/NA tour stop in Salt Lake City this past autumn as well, but his march to the finals in Westchester, keyed by a breakthrough 3-0 semi-final win over Chin, has boosted his confidence greatly and probably accounts for the narrow edge he enjoys in the seedings for this tournament.

That outcome with Chin, which has also been achieved this season by Quick in the third-place play-off in Trinity and Wyant in the semis at Trinity and in the three/four match in Westchester, dropped the 32-year-old three-time ('94, '97, '01 ) S. L. finalist all the way to a No. 5 seeding and a third confrontation in as many months with Tim Wyant, whom Chin had narrowly defeated in a close four games at the Team Trials seven months ago.

WYANT RECOVERS POISE AGAINST CHIN

#5 Seed Richard Chin (foreground) maintained a high energy level but couldn't subdue Tim Wyant

That match had been highlighted by a pivotal third game, which Chin had taken 9-7, and this quarter-final would also turn on a close game, the first, in which a hot-starting Chin led 8-3 before bowing before Wyant's relentless retrieving, squandering three game-balls and surrendering that game 10-8. Wyant ran out the last several points of his 9-5 second-game win and raced off to a 5-0 lead in the third, seemingly in full control. But Chin rallied for a few points and managed to even the score at 5-5 when Wyant, looking over his shoulder a bit, pressed to finish off the match too quickly and committed a few errors.

He did right himself and win 9-5, thereby qualifying for another go at Walker, whose aforementioned pair of wins have both been dominant: 3, 0 and 1 in the Trinity Open finals, and 3, 0 and 5 in the Westchester Classic semis. In both of those matches, however, Wyant was playing his second match of the day, and especially in the Trinity encounter, Tim's first-ever win over the redoubtable Chin had left him thrilled by far too depleted, both emotionally and physically, to offer any real resistance in the ensuing final.

This time, by contrast, the Wyant-Walker semi will be the first and only match of the day, and, as noted, neither has been pressed too hard so far, though Wyant's win over Chin did entail saving those several first-game game-balls and did consume more than an hour. Still, both players should be physically fine for this top-half semi, which is scheduled to start at 3:00 this afternoon and will be immediately followed by the balancing Quick-McNeely semi-final, which is listed as having a 4:15 start time.

Michelle Quibell(l) came on strong, but couldn't close it out against #2 seed Latasha Khan

WOMEN'S SCRAMBLE
In contrast to this quartet of straight-game men's quarter-finals, all four of the women's quarters went at least four games. Both previous Women's Open champ Latasha Khan and her top-seeded older sister Shabana dropped the first games of their respective quarters. Latasha in fact went down two games to love to precocious Yale-bound high school senior Michelle Quibell (a 3-0 first-round winner over Dana Betts) before elevating her game and running out the remainder 9-1, 2 and 2, while Shabana lost the first game to Hope Prockop and was forced to a tiebreaker in the second before eventually triumphing 7-9, 10-8, 9-3 and 9-3.

Both Khan sisters will be facing recent Ivy League all-Americans who barely won, 10-8 in the fourth in each case, over current Harvard stars. Ivy Pochoda, who won the 1998 Women's Intercollegiate Individual championship while carrying the Crimson banner, defeated this year's captain Margaret Elias, who had previously won in three over Blair Clark, yet another Harvard alumna in a Crimson-colored region of the 12-player women's draw.

And 2001 Princeton grad Meredeth Quick engineered the only pre-semi ouster of any top-four seed in either draw when she followed a first-round win over Lindsey Wilkens with a quarter-final win over Wilkens's Harvard teammate and fourth seed Louisa Hall.

The Quick siblings thus became the first brother-sister pair ever to have reached the respective semis of the men's and women's national softball championships in the same year and both will be attempting to extend this family double one round further when they and the other six semi-finalists rejoin the battle for the national championship this afternoon.

Squashtalk will provide complete coverage of both the semis and the finals, as well as a summarizing article on the entire weekend in the next few days. Stay tuned.