ISDA Squash Tour 2008

Writen by Rob Dinerman
Date: December 11/06

Last year's North American Open (NAO) Program noted in the profile of Viktor Berg and Chris Walker that they were the only team in the top five whose members had never played together prior to the outset of that 2005-06 season. This year Berg and Walker are the only team other than their final-round NAO conquerors, six-time defending champions Gary Waite and Damien Mudge, who HAD been together as recently as a year ago. Scott Butcher and Clive Leach, who only joined forces early last February, are already the third longest-tenured team in the top echelon.

Partly due to a kind of cumulative frustration that has increasingly influenced the tour's top protagonists in recent years at the Waite/Mudge dominance (73 titles and 79 final-round appearances in 83 attempts in ISDA ranking-tournament play) and partly due to a growing conviction that, in the wake of Mudge's lingering shoulder injury (incurred while surfing this past summer) and Waite's 40th birthday in September, The Champs might be ready to be picked off, there was a frenzied spurt of partner-switching late last season and during the summer from which a largely realigned top tier has emerged to contend for supremacy and the sport's major titles.

Neither Paul Price and Ben Gould nor John Russell and Preston Quick got off to auspicious starts when they both began their respective partnerships at the season-ending tour stop at the University Club of San Francisco last May: Price and Gould fell to Leach and Chris Walker in a five-game semifinal, while Russell and Quick were out-played by qualifiers Michael Pirnak and Martin Heath in the first round. But both teams rebounded from their false starts out west to oppose each other in the final round of the 2006-07 ISDA season-opening event in Baltimore in early October, fostering a situation that has prevailed ever since in which five teams have emerged as clearly the class of the deep and talented professional doubles field in this continent.

Four ranking events into the current campaign, Waite and Mudge have two titles (Vancouver and Wilmington) and three finals to their credit while compiling a 9-2 won-lost record; Price and Gould (7-1, and 2-0 vs. Waite/Mudge), losing semifinalists at the '06 NAO with their respective partners Jamie Bentley and Quick, triumphed in Baltimore and New York before losing in the semis in Wilmington to Berg and Walker (5-4), who were eliminated in the semis of each of the first three events before reaching the Wilmington final. These three teams have reached at least the semis of every tournament they entered this fall.

Just behind them are Russell/Quick (5-4), with two finals (Baltimore and Vancouver), one semi and one quarterfinal loss on their slate; and Butcher/Leach (5-4), with two semis in three attempts in those four events, but who also earned a final-round berth at the Cambridge Club Doubles, a sanctioned though non-ranking tourney which normally assigns its invitees to random partners but which allowed Butcher and Leach to play together. These five teams have occupied all 16 total semifinal slots in those four events, and the top three (Waite/Mudge, Price/Gould and Walker/Berg) have taken all eight final-round positions and gone a combined 10-0 in their pre-semis matches to this point of the season. What all of this means is that the top few teams have been virtually upset-proof so far, even more so than has been the case in prior years.

That said, the dynamics of this year's NAO are somewhat unusual in the sense that the tournament directly follows a six-week post-Wilmington hiatus due to both the Christmas-holiday break and the reallocation of the ISDA schedule. In the past, there have always been two January tour stops (Wilmington and Boston) prior to the Greenwich, which have enabled the teams to work their way up to a hoped-for peak at the Open. But this season, Wilmington, as noted, has already happened and Boston has switched weekends with Greenwich, meaning that teams will have no opportunity to gradually recapture their pre-holiday form.

There will be additional challenges for this quintet of contending teams as well, including Price's ability to recover fully from the knee injury that he incurred in late November; the pace at which he, Gould and Quick adjust to the head pro jobs each has recently taken at clubs in Toronto, Georgia and Boston respectively; and the very talented host of teams (Bentley/Willie Hosey, Pirnak/Heath and Matt Jensen/Jeff Mulligan chief among them) that are all capable of making a breakthrough and very eager to do so.