Quick And Hewitt Triumph In St. Paul At Indian Summer Open   By Rob Dinerman

Dateline November 17 --- Debuting partners Meredeth Quick and Steph Hewitt fulfilled their pre-tournament No. 1 seeding by stringing together three four-game matches en route to winning the $10,000 Indian Summer Open, hosted at the Commodore Squash Club in St. Paul, Minnesota. Opponents in last year’s final round at this site, where Hewitt and Jess DiMauro defeated Quick and Fiona Geaves, Hewitt and Quick followed a 3-1 opening-round win over Karen Jerome and Marie Vlcek with semis/finals victories (over Marci Sier/Emily Lungstrum and Narelle Krizek/Natarsha McElhinny respectively) in both of which they spotted their opponents the first game and then surged unstoppably through the final three games. The 15-16 15-10 15-9 18-17 final-round result represented the first career WDSA title for Quick and the fourth for Hewitt, who prevailed with DiMauro in 2008-09 tour stops in not only Minnesota but Greenwich and San Francisco as well, and who this past weekend had to cope with an opening-round ankle sprain that necessitated numerous icing sessions and some in-match positioning adjustments on the part of herself and her partner.

   The latter pairing also had to adjust to the shock of having let an 11-4 edge in the first game of their Saturday semi against Lungstrum and Sier dissolve under an 11-1 Lungstrum/Sier run that enabled them to steal that game. Appropriately chastened by that lapse, Quick (who had been over-hitting her drives) and Hewitt (who had frequently “guessed” wrong and been unable to reverse direction on her gimpy foot) sharpened up their production and held their opponents under 10 points in each of the remaining trio of games to reach the final.

  Waiting for them there had been the second-seeded “sister” team of Krizek and McElhinny, close four-game semifinal winners over a Philadelphia pairing (namely Dawn Gray and Amy Milanek) who had pulled off the upset of the tournament with their quarterfinal elimination of the seeded team of Dana Betts and Lee Belknap. A combination of Betts’s tins, Belknap’s ineffectiveness, Gray’s shot-making and Milanek’s clutch heroics (especially her pair of nearly consecutive untouchable reverse-corners that became exclamation points for the close-out fourth game) accounted for that unanticipated outcome, which Gray and Milanek followed by pushing to a two-points-to-love lead in the best-of-five fourth-game tiebreaker, just one point from forcing a decisive fifth game, only to falter at that stage and yield the game’s final three points.

     The final featured high-quality points and really close games, the first and close-out fourth of which were decided by a single point. There were great cross-court battles between Quick and her right-wall opponent McElhinny, a mid-1990’s WISPA No. 19, who wisely stayed away from Hewitt’s reverse-corner and who occasionally was able to create point-ending open-ball opportunities for her sister. Hewitt’s forehand rails were not as tight as they had been when she and Krizek won the ’06 Women’s Worlds, possibly a consequence of her having spent all of last season playing the left wall while partnering DiMauro, so she kept the ball high on Krizek and looked to shoot whenever possible. Throughout the weekend there was a real question as to whether Hewitt would be able to finish the tournament, given the swelling in her ankle, but she gritted her way through, avoiding a looming fifth game when at 17-all in the fourth Krizek was unable to cross to the left wall on an over-hit cross-court, leaving just enough room for Quick to feather a front-left drop-shot that no one was able to track down.

   Tournament Chairman John O’Brien and his wife Amy did an incredible hands-on job of running not only the WDSA event (including two full pro-am flights) but also A, B, C and 50-and-over brackets in both singles and doubles that involved 142 entrants in all. The Squash Scholars, an urban youth-enrichment group based at the University of Minnesota, participated, and in keeping with the WDSA mission statement and its explicit reference to the importance of promoting the game to youngsters throughout the socio-economic spectrum, the Association ran a clinic conducted by Sier and Joyce Davenport in which Squash Scholars members were the beneficiaries. The next stop of the WDSA schedule will be the Turner Cup in Manhattan next month, followed by the biennial Briggs Cup at the Apawamis Club in Rye in mid-January.