ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Written by Rob Dinerman
Date: April 09/09

         Like a close basketball contest featuring many late-game lead changes, the race for the top end-of-season team ranking between 2007 No. 1 Paul Price and Ben Gould (who wrested this distinction from its seven-year captivity with Gary Waite and Damien Mudge) and 2008 No. 1 Mudge and Viktor Berg has shifted back and forth a total of five times during the course of the current 2008-09 ISDA schedule, with an early Price/Gould burst from the starting gates (winning the season-opening tour stops in Baltimore, New York and Toronto); a responding Mudge/Berg trilogy (St. Louis, Wilmington and Boston) from late-November through mid-January; a successful Price/Gould foray in the late-January North American Open; an undefeated Mudge/Berg February (during which they triumphed in both Cleveland and Brooklyn); and, this past weekend in Long Island and Manhattan, the determined advance by Price and Gould to victory at the Players Championship (renamed after seven editions as the Creek Challenge Cup), whose $40,000 purse is the biggest of the season, at the final-round expense of Mudge, the head pro at the University Club of New York, which hosted the final (after most of the matches had been held at the Creek Club in Long Island), and Berg, whose comeback bid after losing the first two games foundered when they dropped a tight third-set best-of-nine tiebreaker, five points to three.

   The only ranking event remaining on the 2008-09 docket will be later this month in Vancouver (the sanctioned but non-ranking Worlds tournament is set for San Francisco in early May), where this back-and-forth season-long competition, which still can go either way, will finally be resolved. These two titans have between them won the last 24 ranking ISDA tourneys over the past 18 months dating back to October 2007 (when Clive Leach and Chris Walker defeated both of them in Baltimore) and have met head-to-head in 12 of those finals, including six times this season (namely in New York, Toronto, St. Louis, Greenwich, Cleveland and now at the Players Championship), with Price and Gould holding a 4-2 advantage.

   The Players Championship not only went very much according to pre-tournament prediction, but also featured a number of favored teams avenging midseason upset losses to lower-ranked opponents. Price and Gould won a four-game semifinal against Leach and Matt Jenson, who had defeated them by one point in the fifth game of a Boston semifinal three months ago and who in their quarterfinal had thrashed (three single-figure games) their Wilmington conquerors Steve Scharff and James Hewitt. Similarly, Mudge and Berg’s semi, also a four-gamer, redeemed a season-opening setback they had sustained at the hands of Preston Quick and John Russell, who had been two points (2-1, 13-12) from beating them in the Brooklyn final and who themselves had been required in advancing to that stage to first out-duel Mark Chaloner and Willie Hosey, who had upset them at the Cambridge Club and who in this quarterfinal rematch were one point from taking a two-games-to-one lead before being undone at simultaneous-game-ball in the third when an innocuous-looking forehand cross-court by Quick skidded erratically off the left wall (possibly after hitting a wet spot) at a flustered Hosey, who could only foul-tip it, preceding a close-out 15-10 fourth game.

   In the remaining pair of Players Championship quarters, Price and Gould rose superior to Walker and Jonny Smith, while Mudge and Berg did the same against Yvain Badan and Eric Vlcek, who a few weeks earlier had partnered Whitten Morris to the winner’s circle at the Germantown Racquet & Fitness Club in Philadelphia, site of the third and final “Challenger” tournament (for players ranked out of the top eight and with a purse below the $20,000 full-ranking minimum) this season. Vlcek and Morris --- who would team with Trevor McGuinness to successfully defend their U. S. National Doubles title in late March in Denver --- defeated Tom Harrity and his nephew Todd Harrity, the U. S. under-19 singles champion, in the semifinals and Jeff Mulligan and Ben Howell in the final. Howell and Mulligan had won a five-game semi over Tim Porter and Greg Park, quarterfinal winners over second seeds Hamed Anvari and Andrew Merrill. Vlcek and Badan had captured the early-October Challenger event in Pittsburgh with a final-round triumph over top seeds Chaloner and Hewitt. The latter would team up with Hosey to win the middle Challenger tourney at the Philadelphia Racquet Club. The novel Challenger concept made what has to be considered a highly productive debut this season, with the bipartite goal of getting players just below the very top tier the opportunity to play their way into an ISDA draw’s late rounds, while also giving aspiring new sites a low-budget means of sampling ISDA-level play with the hope that they will utilize this experience to grow into full ranking tournaments. It is worth noting in this dual regard that many of the winners and finalists of these Challenger events had their best-ever seasons in full-ranking ISDA competition ---- Badan, Chaloner, Hewitt and Morris definitely fall into this category, as does Shane Coleman, who with partner Gavin Jones attained the Philly Racquet Club finals and who then just two weeks later teamed with Morris to reach his first ever ISDA quarterfinal (and Morris’s second) in Brooklyn --- and that several of the host sites emerged from their weekend strongly committed to expand into full-ranking stops on the 2009-10 ISDA tour.