ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Pro Am Results:

  In addition to the Pro championship, the Briggs Cup extravaganza featured three highly competitive $15,000 pro-am flights, the Kane Cup, the Karlen Cup and the Jennings Cup, named in honor of significant past Apawamis Club members. Briggs himself commented in a speech immediately preceding the Pro final on how hard the ISDA pros played and how supportive they were of the partners to which they had been assigned.

  In the Kane Cup final, Raj Nanda and former Princeton varsity player Bill Ullman defeated ’09 Trinity captain Manek Mathur and former WPSA top-20 Mark Barber in three tight games. Mathur and Barber had received a walkover in the semis when their opponents, former Harvard captain Pete Karlen and former Yale captain Josh Schwartz (whose father, Sanford Schwartz, had founded the Citysquash youth-enrichment organization that was the designated charity for the Briggs Cup event), had to default due to the severe cramps that befell Schwartz in the wake of a two-hour quarterfinal.

  The Jennings Cup competition saw Walker and Rob Dinerman rise superior, albeit barely, to first Gordy Anderson and James Hewitt and then Leach and Mark Walsh, 15-12 in the fourth in both cases. Leach’s lethal shot-making accuracy and creativity had enabled his team to win 20 of the first 21 points, but the outcome turned first on a four-point run from 11-14 to 15-14 in the second and later when Walker/Dinerman rallied from 7-10 in the fourth, which they closed out from 13-12 on a Dinerman forehand reverse-corner winner followed by a tremendous feat of court coverage by Walker culminating in his powerful forehand cross-court that concluded matters after a 75-minute war of nerves and attrition.

   The Karlen Cup final matched Mudge and his partner Nan O’Neill against Carl Baglio, an assistant pro to Mudge at the University Club of New York, and Michael Walsh (no relation to Mark), an aspiring high-school talent. O’Neill, who played the entire match with a winsome smile on her face that belied the degree to which she was understandably the target of most of the Baglio/Walsh attack, stood up remarkably well under the constant pressure. For his part, Mudge, who could have easily “coasted” and saved his energy for the imminent Pro final, especially when his team fell behind 3-0 set-5 in the fourth-set tiebreaker, instead demonstrated the professionalism that permeates the entire ISDA tour when he impelled a furious comeback by covering virtually the entire court in a 5-1 run that he finished off by lashing a cross-court past Walsh for an 18-17 score, necessitating a fifth game that Baglio and Walsh were able to win by the close count of 15-12.