Walker, Khan Conquer Quick Siblings, Retain/Regain U. S. National Softball Titles

 

Repeat S.L. Green Champion Damian Walker

Showing the poise, skill and motivation of the USSRA National Champions they have been and continue to be, top men's seed Damian Walker and second women's seed Latasha Khan emphatically terminated the national championship dreams of the Quick siblings, Preston and Meredeth respectively, with a pair of straight-game victories that brought them the 2002 Men's and Women's Open Softball Championships, which were hosted for the first-ever time at Yale University's fabled Payne Whitney Gymnasium. Walker successfully defended his 2001 title with a 9-4, 3 and 7 final-round win while Khan avenged her older sister Shebana's loss in yesterday's semis with a 9-7, 9-1, 10-8 triumph that returned her to the winners circle she had previously occupied after the 1998 and 2000 editions of this 20-year-old event.

Though their dual bid for their respective crowns ended one match short of its goal, the Quicks nevertheless deserve to be saluted for the unprecedented feat they achieved in placing family members in both the Men's and Women's final in the same year. Neither had ever advanced this far in a tournament of this magnitude and both had to engineer upset wins in their respective Saturday afternoon semis, Preston's coming in a rallying four over second seed and '99 S. L. Green winner Dave McNeely (who destroyed an exhausted Tim Wyant, 9-0, 0 and 6 in the third-place play-off this morning) and Meredeth's involving a straight-game dethronement of defending 2001 champ and top seed Shabana Khan, whose continuing demoralization at the third-game shut-out Quick pinned on her was evidenced in the relatively tepid resistance she offered in her 3rd/4th pre-final match with the Amsterdam-based '98 Intercollegiate Individual Champion Ivy Pochoda, who dismissed her in three games.

Finalist Meredith Quick(l) and Champion Latasha Khan

Walker's successful defense of the crown he won last year (after losing to Marty Clark in the preceding year's final) was a testimony to the efficiency with which he has been playing in the 12 interceding months, particularly in the subsequent quartet of Americans-only tourneys, all of which he has won without losing a game. Since winning the fifth and decisive game of his 2001 S. L. Green final with Richard Chin, Walker has swept through four matches in the U. S. Team Trials, three matches each in the Trinity Open and Westchester Classic and now all four matches in this 2002 U. S. National competition, 43 straight games overall without a loss, though he has frequently faced late-game deficits and even had multiple game-balls against him a half-dozen times during this 15-match run.

In fact, straight-setters characterized this year's event in a major way; starting with the quarter-final round, and including the aforementioned McNeely-Wyant match for third place, the 12 total matches required only 37 games to resolve, just one (Quick's first-game loss in his McNeely semi) above the minimum. And both women's semis, as well as the third/fourth play-off and the final, had 3-0 tallies as well. No one in either draw was able to reverse his/her opponent's early momentum, and this phenomenon was especially applicable when either of the eventual champions was playing.

The 32-year-old British-born Walker, who at one stage was ranked No. 23 in the world and says he is playing as well now as he ever has, at this point is simply too experienced a competitor with too polished a game for any of his predominantly much-younger opponents--- including his semi-final- and final-round victims, both of whom are barely two years removed from their last college matches-to handle. He consistently is able to achieve a level of depth and width on his strokes that outdoes that of the youthful Americans, who either make the mistake of trying to out-execute him or take risks that usually backfire in an effort to bring him up front and tire him out.

Finalist Preston Quick

Quick actually applied this latter stratagem far better than any of Walker's prior opponents had done, particularly in the third game, in which he gained a 5-1 lead and appeared to have the usually self-assured Walker flustered, a trifle fatigued and definitely in some trouble. Quick's straight drop, which had been such an effective weapon in his semi-final win over McNeely, enabled him to control much of the play in the second half of this match as well. There was a much more competitive battle, both for court position and on the scoreboard, on this occasion than there had been in the prior meeting between these two contestants, in the semis of the Trinity Open ten weeks earlier, and there were many points in which Quick had his opponent on the move for several exchanges, only to hit a loose ball or tin when a potentially point-ending moment arose.

Walker's rally in that final third game was assisted both by a few of the foregoing instances and a pair of well-spaced, important and questionable "let-point" calls that went his way, though even with these factors in his favor, the third game went to 7-all. A Walker length winner was followed by yet another long rally at match-ball that ended with Quick barely tinning a forehand drop shot that a somewhat tired and highly relieved Walker almost certainly would not have been able to retrieve. A solid, praiseworthy and successful title defense for Walker, but a great tournament as well for Quick, whose season-long alternation between PSA/NA softball tournaments and the ISDA professional doubles schedule seems to have moved him slightly ahead of his class of 2000 contemporaries Wyant and McNeely, and whose tactic of forcing Walker up front, as John Musto had also done with some effect two rounds earlier, may well have finally revealed a chink in Walker's formidable armor.

Women's Open Champion Latasha Khan

The women's final was well-played and lively, as the unseeded Meredeth Quick hoped to carry forward the momentum she had gained in her four-game opening-round win over Harvard's Lindsey Wilkins, her 3-1 victory over Wilkins's teammate, third-seeded Louisa Hall and, especially, her straight-game upset of the top-seeded defending champion Shabana Khan, whom Quick had whitewashed 9-0 in an exuberant final game. Latasha Khan, by contrast, had faced a two games to love deficit in her quarter-final with Yale-bound high school senior Michelle Quibell before responding with a three-game rally, which she followed with a three-game semi over Pochoda.

She has possibly the best balance and almost certainly the best-developed all-around game of any of the American women players, now that her several-times final-round conqueress Demer Holleran has retired, and the fact that this was her sixth USSRA Open final, and only Quick's first, may have played a role as well, especially in the close end-game rallies in the first and third games that sandwiched Khan's dominance in the second game. This was a breakthrough weekend performance for Quick, who is currently occupying the assistant pro position the Round Hill Club in Greenwich, CT that was held last season by her older brother, and who saw both the diligent training regimen she has sustained and the match experience she has gained playing in the qualifying round of the WISPA pro women's circuit pay off with this advance all the way to the final of this prestigious national event. But Khan's drop shots, angles, stroking prowess and mobility were enough to enable her to win her last nine games after her initial stumbles against Quibell and to make her a most deserving three-time National Women's Open champion.