A Retrospective Look At The 2024 Maryland Club Open

Posted Posted in 2024, News

By Rob Dinerman On the first weekend of October 2024 the Maryland Club Open (MCO) returned to the Squash Doubles Association (SDA) schedule after a five-year hiatus due to the Covid pandemic that shut the SDA tour down for nearly two years, followed by Baltimore’s hosting of the 2023 Can-Am competition — and a memorable and triumphant return it was! This latter phenomenon is fully in keeping with an MCO tradition throughout its prior 16 editions of playing host to a major upset, an eleventh-hour comeback, an intriguing back-story or a landscape-changing result — sometimes (as in 2024) all four! For the first time in the history of this tournament — whose inaugural holding took place more than two decades earlier in October 2003 — there was a women’s pro event (possibly related to the club itself having gone co-ed in 2021, 167 years after its founding as a men’s-only club in 1857), as well […]

A History Of The Maryland Club Open – By Rob Dinerman

Posted Posted in 2024, News

A WELCOME RETURN This weekend will mark the welcome return of the Maryland Club Open (MCO) to the professional doubles schedule after a five-year hiatus largely due to the Covid pandemic and the hosting of the Can-Am Cup one year ago. Virtually every one of this tournament’s preceding 15 editions — the fifth-most of any tour stop, exceeded by only the Johnson Memorial, the North American Open, the Big Apple Open and the Boston Pro-Am — has been characterized by a major upset, the emergence of a contending team and/or a result that changes the dynamics of the tour — sometimes all three! This phenomenon began with the very first main-draw match of the inaugural 2003 event on Halloween night when Chris Deratnay and Alex Pavulans pulled off a shocking upset victory over the fearsome Blair Horler/Clive Leach duo. Horler and Leach had been the tour’s hottest team during the last half of the 2002-03 […]