Dateline November 16 --- Trailing two games to love and forced to deal with a best-of-nine third-game tiebreaker the losing of which would have caused their unceremonious first-round ouster, top seeds Steph Hewitt and Natarsha McElhinny responded to this unexpected early crisis by sweeping through five straight points and five straight additional games to win the Indian Summer Open, the first tournament of the 2010-11 WDSA season, hosted as always by the Commodore Squash Club in St. Paul, Minnesota. This was the third Indian Summer Open crown for Hewitt in as many years and with as many different partners, preceded by her title runs in 2008 with Jess DiMauro and last year with Meredeth Quick, when they beat the “sister” team of McElhinny and Narelle Krizek in a four-game final.

   As noted, Hewitt and McElhinny were right on the doorstep of an early elimination this time around, as veterans Karen Jerome and Joyce Davenport, who, like Hewitt/McElhinny, were teaming up for the first time, sharp-shot their way to a two games to love advantage in the semifinal round of this four-team draw. Hewitt, who prefers the right-wall slot (where she was positioned during the Convenors Cup Mixed Doubles event that she and husband James Hewitt had won in Toronto last month with a 3-2 final-round win over Eric Baldwin and Seanna Keating), was being out-played by her Canadian compatriot Jerome during those first two-plus games, while Davenport was opening up the court with her lobs and hitting reverse-corner front-right winners with McElhinny stuck behind her. By late in the third game, Hewitt and McElhinny were finally starting to gain some rhythm, but Jerome and Davenport were still able to catch them at 13-all, leading to that potentially match-ending overtime session. However, when Hewitt and McElhinny took all five points, they pressed that momentum through a one-sided fourth game and to a big enough lead in the fifth to enable them to hold off a too-late Jerome/Davenport rally and come away with a fate-tempting but fully deserved 11-15 12-15 18-13 15-2 15-10 ticket to the final.

    Waiting for them there were Krizek and Marci Sier, winners of the Chicago 2009 WDSA event and straight-set winners as well (by the odd score of 15-1 13-18 15-10 15-5) in this weekend’s semifinal over the Philadelphia pairing of Dawn Gray and Amy Milanek. The final came close to being a mirror image of the Hewitt/McElhinny semi, since this time THEY were the team that dominated early on before their rallying opponents forced a crossroads third-set best-of-nine tiebreaker. Hewitt, her left-wall game fully honed by her semifinal battle with Jerome, was handily winning her rail exchanges with Sier, who also was being strenuously pressured by the hard cross-courts that McElhinny was firing in her direction, while Krizek was for the most part being prevented from getting into the action.

   Only in the third game, after the eventual champs had already pocketed the opening pair, 15-7 and 15-11, was Krizek able to put her handprint on the match by circling behind Sier to field McElhinny’s high cross-courts and execute her imaginative shot-making skills from the back wall. This adjustment also emboldened Sier, who played her best squash of the match, enabling her team to move to 4-2, set-five, triple-game-ball, with the momentum of the match seemingly turning in their direction.

    But at this juncture, McElhinny buried a forehand straight-drop (the same shot she had hit the day before to seal the fifth game of the semifinal), following which Sier hit a backhand rail right back at herself for a stroke call that made the score 17-all. On the ensuing point, after a long series of mostly conservative exchanges (with no one wanting to commit a game-losing error), McIlhinny hit a forehand cross-court that Sier was unable to handle, as her attempted response soared over the front-wall boundary line, concluding the 15-7 15-11 18-17 tally and leaving the finalists to lament what might have occurred had they been able to come away with that third game.

    The Indian Summer weekend as a whole, expertly run as always by Tournament Chairman John O’Brien and his wife Amy, featured 11 different competitive categories (almost all of which also offered Consolation draws) in singles and doubles and several hundred amateur participants, a number of whom entered multiple draws. Perhaps the on-court star of the weekend was the young Cornell varsity member Will Hartigan, who won the A Singles, the A Doubles (with O’Brien as his partner) and the A Mixed Doubles, where he and Milanek defeated former Yale varsity player Frank Fairman and McElhinny in the final. Also present and enlivening the weekend considerably were the incomparable Sharif Khan, record 12-time North American Open (hardball) champion during the late 1960’s through the early 1980’s, and two-time North American Open champion John Nimick, the renowned squash tournament promoter and a finalist (in 1984) in Minnesota when the Commodore Club was a popular annual stop on the WPSA pro hardball tour throughout the decade of the 1980’s. The next event on the WDSA women’s pro doubles calendar will be the Turner Cup, offering a WDSA record-by-a-wide-margin $50,000 main-draw purse, which will be held in New York City in early December.