ISDA Squash Tour 2012

Tournament Results:

Smith And Nanda Capture 2010 Pittsburgh Cup By Rob Dinerman

     October 12 --- Trailing two games to one against an upset-minded pair of power-hitting youngsters, top seeds and first-time partners Jonny Smith and Raj Nanda strongly rallied to a five-game victory over many-times U. S. Junior national champions Trevor McGuinness and Todd Ruth this past Sunday afternoon at the Pittsburgh Golf Club in the final round of the second annual Pittsburgh Cup. It was Nanda’s second Challenger title (preceded when he and Mark Price defeated Imran Khan and Tom Harrity in the St. Louis final last November) and the first for Smith, who in his only prior Challenger-event appearance (in Wilmington last December) teamed with former Trinity teammate Yvain Badan to take a two games to love final-round lead over Chris Walker and Mark Chaloner, only to eventually fall 17-16 in the fifth.

   It appeared for quite a while that a similar final-round disappointment might await Smith this time as well when he and Nanda dropped the third game. McGuinness, who combined with Whitten Morris to win the 2008 and 2009 U. S. National Doubles, and Ruth found the warm host courts greatly to their liking as they overpowered first Jacques Swanepoel/Eric Christiansen and then the Toronto duo of Eric Baldwin and Tyler Millard, first-round four-game winners over Will Mariani and Rob Dinerman. There were close games in each of this pair of straight-set matches, with McGuinness primarily coming up with the needed end-game winners.

  His southpaw power and shot-making skills also came to the fore in the first and third games against Smith and Nanda, who had received a bye to the semis of the seven-team field due to their top-seeded status and then survived a competitive four-game challenge from the Khan brothers, Asad (making his ISDA debut) and Imran. The latter’s shot-making accuracy keyed his team’s victory in the second game before Smith and Nanda asserted themselves in the subsequent two games. Both in that Saturday-evening match and in the next-day final, Smith and Nanda were able to make the necessary mid-match adjustments and eventually win going away. The fourth game of the final was 15-9 and the fifth an even more dominant 15-4, as Smith showed why he is the highest-ranked player in the draw (at No. 14) and Nanda started lobbing their opponents to the back of the court, disrupting their fast-pace-oriented rhythm and eventually eliciting enough loose balls and errors to give his team a comfortable margin.

  McGuinness, currently a junior at Penn, and his Philadelphia co-denizen Ruth, a first-year Penn medical-school student after serving last year as team captain at Yale, will clearly be heard from in upcoming ISDA competition, while Nanda and Smith hope to carry the momentum they generated in Pittsburgh into their first-round match-up this Friday in Baltimore, the first full-ranking tournament of the 2010-11 season,  where they will face the third-seeded tandem of John Russell and Preston Quick, Maryland Club Open finalists twice in the past four years.