If there is one stop on the professional doubles squash schedule over the past dozen years that can be counted on to consistently deliver a high-quality presentation, significant innovations and memorable results, both on-court and off, it assuredly has been the Maryland Club Open, which debuted in emphatic fashion with a pair of first-round upsets of seeded teams on Halloween night of 2003 — during which qualifiers Alex Pavulans and Chris Deratnay straight-gamed reigning Kellner Cup champs Blair Horler and Clive Leach right before fourth seeds Josh McDonald and Viktor Berg, four-time finalists the prior season, were ousted by Preston Quick and Jamie Bentley — and whose subsequent history has been permeated with surprising outcomes and first-time occurrences ever since.
These have ranged from the Tournament Committee’s decision in 2008 to partner up with Baltimore SquashWise, a brand-new urban squash program, resulting in further incentive for the membership to support the tournament and leading to a substantial donation to that youth-enrichment organization; to the holding of a Legends of Squash singles tournament in 2010, the debut of the U. S. leg of the global Legends of Squash tour that had been co-founded earlier in the year by Peter Nicol and John Nimick, featuring six elite PSA performers from the recent past (namely British Open champions Jonathon Power, David Evans and Nicol, the eventual winner, along with former PSA No. 1 John White and top-four ranked Martin Heath and Simon Parke),who unexpectedly found themselves so immersed in the doubles that they wound up spending most of their time in the doubles gallery and one of them almost missed his flight home to Europe (!) and resulting in most of them competing in the pro-am doubles when they returned for the Legends portion of the Maryland Club Open the following year; to a level of hospitality extended to the players throughout their stay in Charm City that is unequaled by any stop on the professional doubles circuit. It was the only event to pay teams that lost in the last round of the qualifying draw, it is one of a very few SDA events that completely pays for the hotel-room expenses of every participating player, whether main-draw or qualifier, and since its inception a dozen years ago, it has fully covered the food and beverage expenses incurred by all players throughout their time at the Maryland Club during the tournament weekend. The Maryland Club Open, now entering its 12th edition (there was a one-year hiatus in 2009 since the U. S. National Doubles were held in Baltimore that season), is also the only tournament on the SDA tour to have published a Tournament Program every year that it has been held.
The club’s longtime head professional Andrew Cordova has raised more than one million dollars on behalf of this tournament during this time span, none of it through commercial sponsorship and all of it due to the enthusiasm and generosity of the members themselves, many of whom compete in the several pro-am flights that have always been offered as a popular complement to the pro draw. A modern-era record 10-time Maryland State Open Doubles champion who won the BIDS title three times and was ranked as high as No. 18 in the ISDA standings in 2007, Cordova served the SDA as its Director of Development during its initial two years from 2012-14, during which he sold a half-dozen new sites and played a major role in the doubling of the overall SDA purse to more than a half-million dollars. Since September 2014, he has been taking online courses offered by Western Kentucky University in pursuit of a Masters of Science degree in Recreation & Sports Administration, with a concentration in Facility and Event Management. Cordova is due to graduate in May 2016 and published a lengthy thesis exploring the economic viability of hosting the Olympics in the Spring 2015 edition of the Kapherd (Kentucky Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance) Journal.
This weekend he will be overseeing yet another novel addition to the rich tapestry of the SDA tour, since the Maryland Club Open, in recognition of its lengthy prominence on the pro-doubles circuit (this year, as has frequently been the case in the past, it is the first full-ranking tourney on the 2015-16 schedule), has been selected as the site where the postseason awards from the 2014-15 season will be handed out to the recipients. Prior to this year, the only time that any such awards were bestowed on doubles players occurred in January 2011, when at the World Squash Awards Gala, held in Grand Central Station as part of the Tournament of Champions, the ISDA was included and awards for the 2009-10 season for Team of the Year and Rookie of the Year were given to Damien Mudge/Viktor Berg and Greg Park respectively. During this past summer the SDA membership cast votes for Team of the Year (Damien Mudge/Ben Gould), Player of the Year (John Russell), Most Improved Player (Chris Callis) and Rookie of the Year (co-won by partners Scott Arnold and Robin Clarke), in addition to a Sportsmanship Award (Jonny Smith), and the presentations will be made Saturday evening during the break between the first semifinal and the second.
Of this set of honorees, Mudge and Gould are five-time defending Maryland Club Open champions whose electrifying partnership, highlighted by the 49 titles they have amassed in the 56 tournaments they have entered, actually began in the 2010 edition of this tourney, where they trailed Chris Walker and Mark Chaloner 1-0, 7-4 in the opening round before surging through the remainder of both that match and the entire event to jump-start their undefeated 2010-11 campaign. Mudge, who won the first three holdings of this event from 2003-05 with Gary Waite, has therefore made it to the winner’s circle a record eight times, and either he or Gould (who won with Paul Price in 2006, 2008 and 2009) or both have taken home the trophy every year other than in 2007, when Walker and Leach defeated Mudge/Berg in the semis and Price/Gould in a five-game final. As Mudge and Gould had done four years earlier, Russell and his British compatriot Leach, finalists in the biennial World Doubles in San Francisco in 2009 and in Toronto in 2011 (when they led Mudge/Gould two games to one in the final before being overtaken), made their competitive debut as partners in ranking tournament play in the 2014 Maryland Club Open.
Though they lost in an airtight (15-14 in the fourth) semifinal to Manek Mathur and Yvain Badan on that occasion, they would subsequently enjoy a remarkable season-long performance that included the championships they won at the Big Apple Open, Tompkins Cup and World Doubles in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago respectively, as well as the pair of wins, both in exhausting five-game marathons, that they earned over Mudge and Gould. The most significant of these took place in the final match of the SDA season, the World Doubles final at the Onwentsia Club in suburban Chicago, in which Russell and Leach, trailing two games to one, rallied to a momentous route-going three-hour victory, even though throughout much of the fifth game Leach was cramping so badly in his left leg that Russell frequently had to scurry to the front-right to keep the point going. An eleventh-hour Mudge/Gould 5-1 rally from 6-11 to 11-12 seemed to give them the late momentum, but a hobbled Leach nevertheless miraculously conjured up forehand reverse-corner winners on balls that had caromed off the back wall both at that 12-11 juncture and (after a Gould tin) at 14-11 that capped off this climactic conclusion to the 2014-15 campaign, thereby also forming an intriguing competitive sub-text to the action this coming weekend, where the first SDA event since that World Doubles five months ago will be contested.
Russell, currently the Co-Director of squash at Episcopal Academy and a Maryland Club Open finalist with Preston Quick in 2006, 2008 and 2010, had been relatively inactive during the several years prior to last season, which made the success he enjoyed with Leach all the more praiseworthy and doubtless contributed to the Player of the Year designation he earned, while Leach, remarkably, has now won more ISDA/SDA titles (seven) since he turned 40 in November 2012 than the six that he won during his 12 stand-out seasons prior to reaching that chronological milestone! Both are looking forward with great anticipation to consolidating their impressive recent gains this season, beginning this weekend at the Maryland Club.
So are a slew of contending teams eager to do battle on Eager Street, including Smith and Park, first-time partners Michael Ferreira and Callis, and 2013 Heights Casino finalists and 2014 Hashim Khan Open champs Quick and his two-year partner Matt Jenson, who reached the Maryland Club Open final with Leach in 2011, and who will be making his return this weekend to the competitive fray after spending the past 11 months recovering from a left Achilles tendon rupture incurred during the SDA tour stop in Atlanta in mid-November. If history is any guide, there will be a furious attempt to maintain the pecking order on the part of some teams and to undo, reverse or otherwise transform it on the part of others, and the results could well leave a hearty handprint on all that follows throughout the 2015-16 SDA campaign.
Rob Dinerman has written the centerpiece article for every Maryland Club Open Tournament Program since the inaugural edition of this tournament in 2003. Ranked as high as No. 10 on the WPSA pro hardball tour during the 1990’s, he has published a prep-school memoir, “Chasing The Lion”, and a squash anthology, “Selected Squash Writings”, in the past few years, and his most recent book, “A History Of Harvard Squash, 1922-2010”, was published in September 2015. He was the Official Writer for the men’s pro doubles circuit throughout the 12-year period from 2001-13 and has served in the same capacity for the WDSA women’s pro doubles tour during every year of its existence from 2007 to the present day.