Dateline November 18 --- Stung by their failure to convert a double-game-ball opportunity that would have given them a two games to zero lead, No. 1 seeds Jessica DiMauro and Steph Hewitt reasserted themselves in a one-sided third game and maintained just enough of an edge in the close-out fourth to earn a hard-fought 15-6 15-16 15-5 15-10 victory over 2007 U. S. Nationals title-holders and No. 2 seeds Fiona Geaves and Meredeth Quick in the inaugural Indian Summer Open, a $10,000 WDSA tour stop hosted by the Commodore Squash Club in St. Paul, MN, the scene of some great WPSA tournaments (including the 1978 WPSA Championship, the 1986 North American Open and the 1993 U. S. Open Doubles) during the hardball tour’s glory days of the late-1970’s through the early-1990’s. Hewitt and DiMauro are now two for two this season after previously winning the Field Club Open in Greenwich, CT, in mid-October in the opening event of the 2008-09 WDSA tour.

   Byed to the semifinals of this seven-team tourney by virtue of their top-seeded standing, Hewitt and DiMauro were caught by surprise in their opening game against first-time partners Marci Sier and Joyce Davenport, first-round winners Friday night over former Yale teammates Michelle Quibell and Amy Gross, whose simultaneous adjacent-court victories at the Nos. 1 and 2 positions respectively keyed the 5-4 Howe Cup 2006 final-round win over Trinity that gave the Eli women their third consecutive national team title. After dropping the first game against the recent Yale stars, Sier and Davenport developed a chemistry during the trio of subsequent successful games that carried over into their 15-12 first game against Hewitt/DiMauro, who were a bit slow coming out of the blocks and didn’t react to Sier’s courageous salvos and Davenport’s timely shot-making until it was too late. Realizing that they had to increase the pace against their suddenly-emboldened opponents, Hewitt and DiMauro responded to their one-game deficit with an overwhelming 15-4 second and maintained their superiority throughout the 15-11, 15-9 chapters that followed.

  Meanwhile, Geaves and Quick were rolling through their pair of pre-final matches in the draw’s bottom half without yielding more than 10 points in any of their six combined games. Neither the Lauren Doline (another recent Yalie)/Nadia Jomo nor the Dana Betts/Marie Vlcek duos were able to offer a significant challenge, although Betts and Vlcek had made a solid debut as first-time partners in a straight-set quarterfinal win over Amy Milanek and Cairn Meek.

  Geaves and Quick have been excellent in simultaneous-game-point situations during the several years of their partnership --- their 2007 Nationals final was a 17-16 fifth-game thriller at the expense of Narelle Krizek and Hewitt ---- and this fortunate phenomenon showed itself again in the second game of their final against Hewitt and DiMauro (who had dominated the opening game), when at 2-all, set-three, Hewitt circled back to retrieve a parabolic Quick backhand lob over DiMauro, only to have the ball roll insolently out of the back-wall nick. Quick had mostly been engaged in prolonged left-wall exchanges with Hewitt, whose noteworthy mobility belied her early-tournament ankle sprain in Greenwich, and whose racquet acumen was especially praiseworthy given her relative unfamiliarity with the left wall --- but her lob defied DiMauro’s attempt to volley it and landed in exactly the most propitious location.

  However, just as had happened in the Greenwich final against Geaves and Karen Jerome 14 days earlier – when Hewitt/DiMauro similarly  took the first game handily, lost the second and immediately regained the momentum in building a 10-6 third-game lead before play prematurely ended when Jerome badly injured a calf muscle and had to default --- Hewitt and DiMauro rebounded from their second-game setback in Minnesota by seizing control right away in the 15-5 third and never really relinquishing it for the remainder of the match. Quick, who had been expected to have the edge over Hewitt on the left, was playing conservatively, usually going deep rather than looking for shot-making opportunities, and it was therefore often Hewitt who shot first, a strategy that was abetted by the host club’s somewhat “slow,” ball-absorbing front wall, which kept the ball down, especially reverse-corners, on which Hewitt was doing much of her scoring. Her partner, DiMauro, the fastest player on the court, was for her part forcing the action as much as possible with her aggressive forays and intrepid shot-making.

 With all that, even after DiMauro/Hewitt had registered that one-sided third game and gained a several-point lead by mid-fourth, it always appeared that Geaves, who beat Hewitt several times with her patented forehand cross-court drop volley into the front-left nick, and Quick (who started shooting as the fourth game moved along) were on the verge of a spurt that would force a fifth game they might well have been able to win –- until, that is, DiMauro nailed a pair of consecutive-point forehand reverse-corner winners (the first of which came on a ball that seemed to be too far past her for such a shot to be possible) that halted the Quick/Geaves rally, effectively sealing the eventual 15-10 outcome and giving DiMauro (whose up-the-middle drive on match-ball caught both of her opponents by surprise) her fourth WDSA tour stop win (twice last season with Natalie Grainger) in five tournaments since the tour’s inception in November 2007.

   The WDSA pro tourney headlined an annual Indian Summer Open extravaganza (now several decades in the holding) that featured a 13-team WDSA Pro-Am draw --- in which every match from the quarterfinals on went at least four games, with Sier and Bill Whitaker rallying from 1-2 down in their semi vs. DiMauro and Herb Lewis before out-playing Amy Gross and Dave Hutchinson in a four-game final --- as well as A, B and C flights in both singles and doubles, whose participants included not only the Minnesota squash community but many from surrounding states as well as Canada. Tournament Chairman John O’Brien was heroic in organizing, conducting and overseeing the entire three-day operation, and full results are available on the web site he maintains, namely www.commodoresquashclub.com.