by Rob Dinerman
This early-October 2026 weekend will mark the 18th edition of the Maryland Club Open (MCO), a tournament that has become renowned for not only the hospitality it extends to the players but for the manner in which they have reciprocated by engineering some of the most noteworthy results anywhere on the SDA tour. Both of the past two MCO Men’s Challenger events have been won by first-time partners, in each case with distinctively memorable paths to the winner’s circle. In a 2024 semifinal, David Letourneau and Drexel College men’s and women’s head coach Jon White trailed Sam Fenwick and Chris Long 14-9 in the fifth game (after previously fending off two match-balls against them in the third) before, however improbably, running off the last six points and thereby establishing a degree of momentum that carried them through a straight-game final-round victory over No. 1 seeds Ashley Davies and Lockie Munro. Then last year John Russell and 2010 Intercollegiate Individuals winner Colin West became the first team in the history of the MCO (whose inaugural edition occurred in 2003) to annex this championship by recording three consecutive five-game victories.
The 2025 MCO Challenger also marked the first time in the annals of this event in which neither of the top two seeds survived their first-round match. The No. 1 seeded team, consisting of New York Athletic Club pros Clinton Leeuw and Jaymie Haycocks, returned to the site of their surge to the 2025 U.S. National Doubles crown seven months earlier — which featured an amazing final-round rally from a 2-0, 11-5 deficit against Russell and Steve Scharff — where they were edged, 15-13 in the fourth, by Long and Fenwick, who hit a shallow, floor-hugging forehand winner from the back wall at match-ball. Second seeds White and Cole Osborne similarly exited at this quarterfinal stage when Yash Bhargava and Lucas Rousselet out-played them in four games.
Meanwhile, both matches in the draw’s midsection went to a fifth game: Russell and West had an exciting and entertaining back-and-forth battle with Mark Price (understandably the crowd favorite since he has been based for years at the host club) and his Australian compatriot Matt Jenson that didn’t end until Russell knifed a backhand reverse-corner winner at 14-13 in the last game, while former late-twenty-teens college stars Adham Madi (an important member of the only Columbia team ever to win the Ivy League pennant in 2018) and 2018 Intercollegiate Individuals finalist Kush Kumar, who had teamed up only one prior time, dropped the first two games to Anderson Good and Clark Doyle before suddenly hitting their stride and charging through the final trio of single-figure games.
Kumar and Madi then had a competitive though straight-game win (15-13, 13 and 10) over Fenwick and Long, but in the bottom-half semi Bhargava and Rousselet first forced a fifth game (when Bhargava carved a backhand winner at 14-all in the fourth) and then staged an amazing rally in the fifth from deficits of 12-4 and later 14-9. A Rousselet forehand cross-court winner up front, followed by a stroke call against Russell and a Rousselet forehand overhead volley into the front-left nick narrowed the score to 14-12, leading to a frantic all-court, 26-hit rally (featuring several desperation retrievals) that finally ended when Russell — with Bhargava stuck on Russell’s right hip after making a tough get up front — pounded a backhand drive to perfect length down the left wall.
He and West had prolonged mid-game streaks in capturing the first two games of the final. Behind 11-6 in the opener, they ran off nine straight points, with West’s hard-serving tactics giving them early-point advantages several times and his backhand roll-corner winner capping off an exchange that involved 77 hits and consumed two minutes and 19 seconds on the game’s final point. They then went from 6-8 to 11-7 (a 7-1 run) in taking the second game (also 15-11), but at that juncture Madi and Kumar, just as they had done two matches earlier in their emphatic quarterfinal turnaround against Good/Doyle, handily won both the third and fourth games. The fifth seesawed tensely along either evenly or with Russell/West holding a slim lead. A Russell backhand reverse-corner winner at 10-9, balanced out by a Kumar drop-shot winner (11-10) led up to the most memorable and impactful point of the day, a ferocious sequence at the conclusion of which Russell nailed a look-away backhand drive that for all the world looked like he was planning to hit something else and that arrowed past an understandably wrong-footed Madi, following which the latter tinned a backhand straight-drop after a 22-hit rally that made the score 13-10. After a several-minute play stoppage to towel off the front-left part of the court (when Russell had landed after making a diving retrieval near the end of the prior point), first Madi and then Kumar tinned away the final two points. It constituted the third straight match in which Russell — albeit in his late 40’s and by then 15 years removed from the last of his three MCO final-round advances (in 2006, 2008 and 2010, in each case with Preston Quick as his partner) during the first decade of the 2000’s — came up with the decisive blow.
In the women’s event — in which all but one of the seven matches from the quarterfinals onward either went to at least a fourth game or had at least one game decided by two points or less — Gina Stoker and Nikki Todd successfully defended the MCO title they had won one year earlier in the tournament’s inaugural women’s professional draw. Their semifinal opponents, Rachel Mashek and Olivia Walsh, quarterfinal 15-14, 14 and 9 winners over Lauren West (no relation to Colin) and Meredeth Quick, ambushed the reigning champs 15-8 in the second game before Todd and Stoker restored order in the 15-4, 15-6 close-out. In the draw’s bottom half, first-time partners Kayley Leonard — an MCO finalist one year earlier with her usual partner Maria Elena Ubina, who spent that weekend at a friend’s wedding — and Line Hansen followed a four-game quarters win over Tina Rix and Fernanda Rocha by defeating Suzie Pierrepont and Katie Tutrone when Hansen’s shallow forehand drive slid into the middle of the court, eluding her opponents’ attempts to scoop it up at 14-13 in the close-out third game.
Hansen and Leonard then fell just short in the first two games of the final before racing out to a 12-5 lead in the third and closing it out 15-8. The fourth game was close all the way to a seemingly inevitable 14-all denouement, a 20-hit, all-court affair in the final stretch of which Leonard blasted a forehand at Todd, who was caught less than ten feet from the front wall but who nevertheless first fended off that salvo and then volleyed a match-concluding forehand drop-shot winner from her upfront position when Hansen hit the next ball into Todd’s swinging range.
In any number of ways, the 2025 MCO results were a harbinger of what followed during the remainder of the busy (23 men’s events, six of them Challengers, and 10 women’s) 2025-26 SDA Pro Doubles Tour. Russell consolidated his MCO victory by also winning the Onwentsia Open in suburban Chicago with Kyle Martino in early November and the Tompkins Cup at the Racquet Club of Philadelphia in mid-March with another first-time partner, namely Haycocks. Madi’s strong season, highlighted by his winning the R&TC Challenger and Silver Racquets with Marwan Tarek and the U.S. National Doubles with Haycocks, earned him the SDA Men’s Most Improved Player Award. Jenson and Price rebounded from the disappointment of their near-miss in Charm City by winning the U.S. National Doubles 45-and-over division without losing a game and Kumar teamed with Sergio Martin to advance to the semifinal round of the inaugural de Ramel Cup in Newport in mid-June.
On the women’s side, Todd and Stoker followed up on their MCO title when they triumphed in the North American Open with a 15-14 final-round victory over Leonard and Ubina when Todd, as she had done on the final point in Baltimore, volleyed a forehand drop-shot winner at simultaneous-championship-point. At season’s-end she won both the SDA Women’s Player of the Year and (with Stoker) the SDA Women’s Team of the Year Award. Leonard, who reached at least the final round of all six tournaments she entered last season, wound up with the No. 1 ranking and Mashek and Walsh built upon their good MCO performance when they won the only women’s SDA tour stop all season — namely the early-May LocalWorld (not a typo) LA Open, where they persevered in five final-round games over Stoker and West — in which neither Todd, Stoker, West, Ubina or Leonard made it to the winner’s circle.
Perhaps the biggest Award winner or all has been the Maryland Club Open itself, whose popularity among the SDA pros is such that they voted this traditional early-season championship the SDA Tournament of the Year four times (from 2014-16 and in 2018) during the twenty-teens, as well as selecting it for an unprecedented back-to-back men’s/women’s “double” as the Men’s Challenger Tournament of the Year and Women’s Event of the Year in both 2024 and 2025 — eight such designations in all, a figure that exceeds that of every other tour stop on the SDA schedule. Both the MCO and the Stoker/Todd pairing will therefore be going for a three-peat of sorts this coming weekend, which, if history is any guide, will be a continuation of what has become a tremendously praiseworthy tradition.
Rob Dinerman has been the Official Writer for the Maryland Club Open Program in every year of the tournament’s existence (beginning with the inaugural edition in 2003) and wrote A History Of The U.S. National Doubles In Baltimore as the feature piece in the Program for the U.S. National Doubles in 2010, when it was held in Baltimore. He has authored 20 books about squash, all of which are arrayed on the home page of the robdinerman.com website. Dinerman’s most recent squash book, A History Of The Kellner Cup, was released this past April.