ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Written by Rob Dinerman
Date: September 08/09

One of the more intriguing trends during the past few ISDA tours has been the number of recent PSA top-10 players who have joined the doubles tour and made a substantial impact. The list includes 2001 British Open finalist Chris Walker and fellow former PSA top-seven-rankees Paul Price, Martin Heath (both ranked as high as No. 4) and Mark Chaloner. Now comes word that former PSA No. 1’s David Palmer, a multiple-winner of both the British and World Opens and still ranked No. 5, and John White are strongly considering joining this group next season; indeed Palmer just this past spring combined with longtime ISDA tour veteran Andrew Slater to win the Massachusetts State Open title, overcoming two-time defending champs Pat Malloy and Sandy Tierney in the final.

    White also made a foray into competitive doubles in April, teaming up with Hansi Wiens to successfully qualify into the biggest prize-money event on the ISDA calendar, the Players Championship, in New York City. For years the only dabbling that PSA players did in professional doubles occurred in the mid-November Cambridge Club Doubles in Toronto, whose format during the early-2000’s period matched up a PSA player with an ISDA star, but now that kind of “doing this as a lark” mind-set has been increasingly replaced by a growing respect for the ISDA purses, organization and professionalism, while providing the motivation to make a solid commitment to the impressive 15-tournament ISDA schedule.

   The first PSA standout to take the plunge was the aforementioned Walker, who would have become the only player ever to wind up winning a British Open he had to qualify into it had he been able to convert the two-games to love lead that he held over Palmer in a final-round match that, by coincidence, took place on his 34^th birthday. Walker, a three-time European champion and seven-time captain (with more than 70 “caps”) of British national teams, two of which won World Team Championships, joined the ISDA tour just prior to the 2001-2002 campaign and has enjoyed considerable success partnering first with David Kay for four years, then starting in 2005 with Viktor Berg (with whom Walker won the ’06 Cleveland and ’07 Denver tour stops while also reaching six other ISDA finals during their two-year partnership) before joining up with his English compatriot Clive Leach (a former PSA top-30 himself during the late-1990’s) to win the opening two tournaments of the 2007-08 ISDA tour.

  They saved multiple match-balls-against in their St. Louis semifinal against Price and Ben Gould before out-playing Damien Mudge and Willie Hosey in the final, then consolidated that achievement less than a week later in Baltimore, where they sequentially defeated both the Mudge/Berg and Price/Gould tandems, which between them have combined to win all 26 ISDA sanctioned tournaments that have taken place since that Maryland Club Open back in October ’07. Even this past year, at age 47 and with coaching/administrative commitments both with the U. S. Squash men’s team and a youth-enrichment organization out in San Diego (where he is also part-owner of a club), Walker had a very respectable showing as Jonny Smith’s partner, reaching the quarterfinal round of every event that they entered.

   Price, Heath and Chaloner all used tournament-winning Cambridge Club Doubles experiences to launch their ISDA careers. Heath and Chaloner both captured that title as Gary Waite’s partner in ’03 and ’01 respectively, while Price teamed with Mudge to prevail in ’04 (by one point in the fifth game of the final vs. Berg and Heath) and ’05 before helping Jamie Bentley, the head pro of the host club, to make his career swan song resoundingly successful when they barely out-lasted Leach and Scott Butcher in a pulsating five-game ’06 final. Like Heath, Chaloner followed a Cambridge Club win with a final-round loss when in ’02 he and Michael Pirnak (Chaloner’s partner during most of the 2007-08 ISDA tour) were bested by Waite and Stewart Boswell, but this past year Chaloner and former PSA No. 17 Willie Hosey had an outstanding season-long performance, highlighted by a pair of late-November wins just five days apart over the No. 4 team of Leach and Matt Jenson (in Toronto and St. Louis), a triumph in Toronto over the No.3 team, Preston Quick and John Russell and semifinal appearances (the first in ISDA ranking-tournament play of Chaloner’s career) in St. Louis and Brooklyn, all of which were enough to establish them at No. 5 in the team end-of-season rankings.

   Even though Heath has devoted much of his energy these past several years to building up a previously middle-of-the-pack University of Rochester men’s varsity into the national powerhouse (and legitimate contender for the 2009-10 national team championship) that it has indisputably become, he had a several-years mid-2000’s extended stint on the ISDA tour in which he augmented his Cambridge Club exploits by  reaching the Boston ’03 semis with Butcher (defeating Leach and Blair Horler in the quarters) and doing the same three years later with Pirnak in San Francisco, where they stormed through the qualifiers, out-lasted Russell and Quick in a five-game quarterfinal and even led eventual champs Waite and Berg two games to one before yielding the last two games. This coming season Heath (who is also well along in his studies towards an MBA at Rochester) and his charges --- who knocked off Yale in the late-February Potter Cup quarters, then overwhelmed Harvard in the third-place playoff --- will take dead aim at ending Trinity’s 11-year grip on the national championship, following which Heath hopes to return to the ISDA tour (where he last competed in autumn ’06) and maintain at least a somewhat active tournament schedule.

   As for Price, his partnership with his Australian compatriot Gould during the past three years has netted 18 ISDA tournament titles, including the ’07 Briggs Cup, the ’07 and ’09 North American Opens and the ’09 Worlds, as well as the No. 1 season-end team ranking for their debut 2006-07 season before they were edged out for that standing in each of the past two years by Mudge and Berg, both times in the final ranking-tournament of the season. Price has also been an ’06 U. S. National Doubles finalist with Bentley (his partner, as noted, in two Cambridge Club triumphs), an ’05 Canadian Pro finalist with Butcher and the ’07 U. S. National Mixed Doubles champion in partnership with his compatriot Narelle Krizek when they beat defending champions Quick and his sister Meredeth by an 18-17 fourth-game conclusion in New York.

   No one knows what will happen when, or if, Palmer, White (who is currently coaching the men’s and women’s college squads at Franklin & Marshall) or any of their PSA-tour colleagues join the ISDA tour next season, and certainly for all the above-mentioned players who have encountered considerable success in the doubles arena, there are other PSA participants who have tried and failed to make the considerable adjustment. The ISDA tour also has drawn talented protagonists from the college ranks --- Trinity alums alone occupy three of the top 20 slots in the current rankings, namely No. 12 Yvain Badan, No. 13 Smith and No. 18 Joe Pentland --- as well as from elsewhere in the squash spectrum. But when an elite PSA player elects to take on the formidable challenge of transferring his singles skills to the ISDA tour, the impact of that decision on the dynamics of the circuit has often been significant and memorable.