ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Photos by Sam Sneed ----------- Germantown Challenger Recap: Vlcek and Morris Fulfill No. 1 Seeding By Rob Dinerman

March 16 --- Top seeds Whitten Morris and Eric Vlcek rolled to victory at the Germantown Cricket Club, located at the outskirts of Philadelphia, in the third and final Challenger (for players ranked out of the top eight) ISDA event this season, the first in the Association’s nine-year history to include this concept, which has proven quite successful in allowing new teams and players to emerge in the late stages of an ISDA draw. Vlcek and his regular partner Yvain Badan won the inaugural Challenger tourney over runners-up James Hewitt and Mark Chaloner in Pittsburgh in early October, and Hewitt and Willie Hosey topped the field at the Philadelphia Racquet Club last month. It will be interesting to see which of these $10,000 events upgrades to the full-ranking $20,000-minimum level next season in keeping with one of the hopes in establishing this Challenger series.

Tournaments without the top-four-ranked ISDA teams are by nature far more “fluid” and less predictable than those in which the occupants of the foremost tier almost always steamroll their way into the semis, as witness the fact that all three teams to successfully qualify into the main draws of this pair of recent Philadelphia Challenger events have proceeded to then win a main-draw match as well. Last month Rob Whitehouse and Greg Park followed a qualifying-round win over Todd Anderson and Tim Porter with a fifth-set overtime quarterfinal victory over second seeds Andrew Merrill and Hamed Anvari before losing a hard-fought four-game semi to Shane Coleman and Gavin Jones in the semis.

This time both qualifying teams (namely Tom Harrity and his 18-year-old nephew Todd Harrity, a Princeton-bound Episcopal Academy senior fresh off winning his third straight U. S. under-19 national singles title less than a week earlier, and the power-hitting duo of Park and Porter) similarly won their respective quarterfinal rounds. The Harrities out-played Carl Baglio and Alex Langerhorst in five games, while Porter (back at his familiar left-wall post, where he can create much more pace, after moving to the right four weeks ago to play with the left-handed Anderson) and Park generated too much pure heat for Merrill and Anvari to withstand in their three-game tilt.

Porter and Park then fell behind first-time partners Ben Howell and Jeff Mulligan (opening-round 3-0 victors over Coleman and Jones) two games to love but stormed through the next two games to force a fifth, by which time Mulligan had become arm-weary, a result at least partially of the carryover effect of his hectic prior weekend in Chicago, where during a non-ranking invitational he had won the pro-am and partnered Stefan Castelyn to a five-game pro-event final before they had barely lost to Clive Leach and Eric Baldwin. Consequently loath to get embroiled in a slugfest with his two much-younger gun-slinging opponents Park and Porter, Mulligan instead started lobbing over Porter, which opened up the front-left for Howell to do some shooting. This the latter did effectively enough to enable his team, aided as well by some tins during that stretch from their impatient opponents, to pull away from an 8-all tie to the eventual 15-9 tally.

Meanwhile, Vlcek and Morris, semifinalists in the Canadian National Doubles a little more than three years ago the last time they had teamed up, were advancing to the Germantown final with a pair of straight-set wins, first over Michael Fensterstock and Will Osnato and then over the Harrity pairing. Howell and Mulligan started well, earning the first game and a mid-game lead in the second. But when Vlcek and Morris, who had opposed each other just two weeks ago in Brooklyn (where Morris and Coleman edged Vlcek and Badan, 15-13 in the fourth, in the round of 16) were able to force and win a tiebreaker both in that game and the third, they were home free in the close-out fourth game. It was the third tournament win this season for Morris, who had successfully paired up first with Michael Ferreira at the Silver Racquets at the Racquet & Tennis Club in Manhattan in early November, and then two months later with Trevor McGuinness in their successful defense of their William White crown at the Merion Cricket Club in suburban Philadelphia. McGuinness, currently a freshman at Penn, and Morris went on last season after the White to capture the U. S. National Doubles title, which they will be attempting to defend in Denver two weeks hence.