Written by Rob Dinerman
Date: September 01/08
In the wake of a 2007-08 ISDA Tour year that featured more movement at the top than at any time in the nearly nine-year history of the Association --- with three different changes in the No. 1 slot, more than had ever before occurred within a single season --- this upcoming 2008-09 schedule is almost certain to be the best yet, with more tournaments, much more total prize-money and sponsorship and quite possibly more contending teams than professional North American doubles has ever seen. By any measure the ISDA has expanded upon last year’s success and, more importantly, laid the groundwork on several fronts for continued growth and popularity in the years to come. First, as noted, has been the proliferation of top-tier teams with a legitimate shot to win a tournament on any given weekend and even to make a legitimate run for the No. 1 position. As last year emphatically proved, gone are the days when a single team can dominate a tour, as Gary Waite and Damien Mudge did throughout the seven-year period from 1999-2006, during which they won 71 of 78 tournaments (reaching 76 finals) and went undefeated wire-to-wire in 1999-2000, 2001-02 and 2004-05, before finally ceding the No. 1 slot to Paul Price and Ben Gould in Waite’s swan-song 2006-07 season. The following year, 2007-08, was comprised of a series of “waves,” with Chris Walker and Clive Leach bursting from the starting blocks with October titles in St. Louis and Baltimore that briefly ensconced them at No. 1, after which Price and Gould had a November/December four-wins-in-five-attempts run that enabled them to regain the No. 1 standing, from which, however, they were displaced when Mudge and Viktor Berg reached all 10 of last season’s post-Thanksgiving finals, winning eight of them to wind up atop the team leader board at season’s-end. The season-long battle between the Mudge/Berg and Price/Gould tandems, which split their six head-to-head meetings in ISDA finals, came down to their Kellner Cup summit in late April, in which Price and Gould, ahead two games to one, led 12-9 in the fourth game (in which they eventually stood at double-championship-point in a best-of-five tiebreaker) and 13-12 in the fifth, only to have those two season-defining games ultimately land (via 16-15 and 16-13 tallies) in the Mudge/Berg column. That trio of pairings, along with Preston Quick and John Russell (who have reached ISDA finals seven times in their past two seasons together, winning the ’07 U. S. Nationals), were a combined 60-1 against the rest of the ISDA field last season, but this year Willie Hosey, Matt Jenson (who will be joining up with Leach), Mark Chaloner and Michael Pirnak will all be starting fresh with new partners, and Joe Pentland and Mark Price, semifinalists in the ’07 Vancouver event and frequent quarterfinalists all year, seem poised to build upon the standing they attained by their consistent level of recent play. All of these elite players, like the talented group ranked behind them, will have a multitude of opportunities to display their skills, as the ISDA continues to add new sites and competitive opportunities, the latest of which will be making its debut appearance this autumn when the first (in Pittsburgh the first weekend of October) of what could be nearly a half-dozen “Challenger” tournaments (open only to players ranked out of the ISDA top 10, with purses below the $20,000 level) is scheduled to function as a squash-doubles counterpart to the satellite circuits that have been such a successful proving-ground accompaniment to the pro-tennis and PSA squash-singles tours. The objective of this novel Challenger-series concept is to create an ISDA presence in new clubs and cities (Pittsburgh, as one example, has never before hosted an ISDA event; Philadelphia, another city that is already on the Challenger series schedule, has only done so once in the past half-dozen years), with a view to moving to full ranking status in coming years, while fostering more interest and tour participation from local teams, new teams and regular-tour qualifying teams (who now can earn both money and valuable ranking points) and allowing mid-level teams, whose fate it has been, as noted in that 60-1 tally, to be eliminated at the essentially upset-proof quarterfinal level by the top four seeds, to instead play each other more often and go deeper into the draws. The formation of the Challenger series is just one of a number of sanguine developments that have recently occurred on both the administrative front (the establishment last year of a Discipline Committee has facilitated swift and efficient action when behavioural issues arose, leading to a measurable improvement in player on- and off-court conduct) and in tour sponsorship, with the two main sponsors, namely Harrow and Inverness Counsel, both of whom have re-upped for this season, providing a generous level of support that has evidenced on a number of fronts, including a much-enhanced tour web site (isdasquash.com) and the promotionally valuable tour brochures that are now published every few months. Perhaps more significant, though less quantifiable, than any of these tangible upgrades, is a very palpable and positive change in the morale of the players, as demonstrated by their willingness, indeed eagerness, to assist the host sites and to hold themselves and each other more fully accountable than ever before for the professionalism of the product they put out to the public every tournament weekend. There is general agreement that the ISDA had its best season ever on this front last year, largely due to the centralization of the Association’s important functions under the aegis of long-time Executive Director James Hewitt, a top-15 player himself, who mostly confined himself to day-to-day operations during the early- and mid-2000’s while Waite took the lead, but who in the wake of the latter’s 2007 retirement has assumed a far more significant role, setting up boards and committees, raising money through sponsorship and basically taking the tour to a whole new level. Waite’s dominance as a player and his personal charisma will always deserve admiration as THE crucial factors in establishing the ISDA tour at the outset of this decade, and it is a sign of the organization’s maturation that the “Gary’s tour” moniker of those early years has now under Hewitt’s direction increasingly made way for a healthier and more widespread current competitive and promotional balance, creating a level of enthusiastic backing from players and sponsors alike that clearly constitutes an improvement for everyone involved.