Congrats to our 2025 Champions!

Of all the venues that have established themselves on the North American professional doubles tour during the past nearly two decades of its existence, the Maryland Club Open (MCO), which began in 2003 and is now entering its 13^th edition (there was a one-year hiatus in 2009 in deference to Baltimore hosting the U. S. National Doubles that season) has delivered by far the most significant innovations, memorable results and player-friendly services. The confluence of its early-autumn positioning on the SDA calendar, extraordinary facilities, enthusiastic membership participation and support, and the dedication and business acumen of head pro Andrew Cordova, has made the Maryland Club one of the most popular tour stops of the entire season and a deserving recipient last October of the SDA’s inaugural Event Of The Year Award to the site “that has made a significant contribution to the tour and its players.”

Cordova, who founded this event and has served as Tournament Director throughout its existence, was ranked as high as No. 18 in 2007 and was the tour’s Director of Development from 2012-14, following which he earned a Masters of Science degree in Recreation & Sports Administration, with a concentration in Facility and Event Management, in an online program offered by Western Kentucky University. He has always looked to expand the MCO’s scope, and has done so from one year to the next on multiple fronts, ranging from a partnership in 2008 with SquashWise, Baltimore’s at-the-time nascent urban squash program, which created further incentive for the members to support the tournament and led to a substantial donation to that inner-city youth-enrichment organization; to the holding of a Legends of Squash singles tournament in 2010, the initial event 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 MCO 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. The MCO was for years 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 covers 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 MCO, which for the second straight year will be hosting the Awards ceremony for the 2015-16 season, is also the only tournament on the pro doubles tour to have published a Tournament Program every year that it has been held, and this tournament has by this juncture acquired the well-earned reputation for starting every new season off with a bang.

That will assuredly be the case this coming weekend as well since, for the first time in the history of the Association, no fewer than six of the top-eight-ranked players will be teaming up for the first time ever with his partner, and one of the two exceptions, No. 1 ranked Ben Gould, winner of this title for each of the past six years with Damien Mudge, recently retired. This means that of the seven top-ranked entered players only John Russell, a four-time Maryland Club Open finalist (in 2006, 2008 and 2010 with Preston Quick and in 2015 with Clive Leach) who again is teaming with Leach, is not part of a debuting team. The first time match-ups are Mudge (a record nine-time MCO champ, the last six with Gould and from 2003-05 with Gary Waite) and Manek Mathur, the Nos. 2 and 3 ranked players respectively; No. 4 Yvain Badan and his former Trinity College teammate No. 7 Michael Ferreira; No. 5 Viktor Berg, who won three tournaments and reached three more finals with Mudge during the second half of last season, and Raj Nanda; and No. 8 Chris Callis, winner of the 2015 Most Improved Player Award, and Jonny Smith.

Of this quartet of brand-new alignments, perhaps the most intriguing is that of Mudge, the tour’s “all-time leading scorer” with more than 150 ranking tournament wins in his ledger, who will move back to the right wall after spending the past nine years on the left, and Mathur, who this weekend will receive both the 2016 Player Of The Year Award and the Team Of The Year Award that he co- won with his partner throughout most of the past six years, the aforementioned Badan. After years of runner-up finishes behind Mudge and Gould, Mathur and Badan finally became the tour’s dominant team during the calendar 2016 portion of last season in the wake of Gould’s December 2015 retirement by winning the Boston event, the North American Open in Greenwich and the Baltimore Open during one seven-week January/February stretch. Two of these titles were earned at the final-round expense of Mudge and Berg, whom Mathur and a briefly-un-retiring Gould also defeated in five riveting games in the final full-ranking tournament in Cleveland this past April.

Ferreira, Badan’s new partner and one of 11 Trinity College alumni among the tour’s top 31 players, was heavily involved in a slew of matches this past season that came down to simultaneous-match-ball, with several players being on both ends of the outcome on multiple occasions. He and Callis lost by this margin on consecutive early-December weekends, first at Wilmington, when Ferreira tinned an open ball against Bernardo Samper and Antonio Diaz, and then in a Briggs Cup quarterfinal against Mathur and Badan. Undaunted by those agonizing near-misses, Ferreira and Callis beat Quick and Matt Jenson (simultaneous-match-ball winners one round earlier after trailing Mathur and Badan 12-3!), 15-14 in the fourth, in the Heights Casino semis, leading into a frenetic first three weekends of March that began with Freddie Reid Jr. and his Canadian compatriot Thomas Brinkman winning the U. S. National Doubles final, 15-14 in the fifth, against Preston Quick and Graham Bassett, on a Brinkman cross-court past Bassett, and continued with yet ANOTHER simultaneous-championship-point conclusion just seven days later at the Hashim Khan Open. The host venue for this latter tournament, the Denver Athletic Club, was the squash stomping ground for the Quick siblings, Meredeth and Preston, both of whom earned their way into their respective finals.

Meredeth Quick and Tarsh McElhinny prevailed over Suzie Pierrepont and Tina Rix in the WSDA pro women’s final, but in the men’s, the hope for a Quick family “double” was dashed, albeit barely, when Preston Quick and partner Jenson came up just short against Jacques Swanepoel and Ferreira, who blasted a backhand cross-court winner to perfect width at 14-all. Never before had consecutive-week doubles tournaments of this dimension both culminated with a simultaneous-championship-ball, and had that last point in Colorado instead landed in the Quick/Jenson column, it would have made for a storybook career ending for Preston Quick, the SDA Director of Development, who announced his retirement during the trophy presentation. One week later at the Germantown Cricket Club in suburban Philadelphia, Ferreira notched his second SDA title in as many weeks when he and Callis won in five games against Swanepoel (who in February had won the Pittsburgh Challenger tourney with Jenson) and James Stout.

Berg, the only player to have won multiple tournaments on each wall during the past two years (he played the left wall in partnering Hamed Anvari to both the 2015 St Louis Open and the Challenger tournament that year in Germantown, then switched to the right when he and Mudge joined forces midway through last season), will move back to the left to team up with Nanda, and Callis, who in addition to his run in Germantown last March with Ferreira reached the Big Apple Open final with Mathur in November, should be a good fit with the decorated veteran (and 2013 World Doubles finalist with Leach) Jonny Smith.

While the real-time attempts of all of these talent-heavy new pairings to create instant chemistry will no doubt make for fascinating viewing from the Maryland Club galleries (as should charting the post-MCO adjustments they make as the season moves along), it should not be forgotten that intact partnerships like Scott Arnold and Robin Clark, whose several-year ascent has now landed them in the top-10, and oldies-but-goodies Leach (who missed the latter part of last season after undergoing mid-March knee surgery) and Russell could have a major impact on the 2016-17 season as well. There is always a furious free-for-all as a new pecking order is established at the outset of each season, even more so this year in light of all the new partnerships that formed over the course of this past summer, and, if history is any guide, what happens this weekend during the Maryland Club Open is likely to set the stage for everything that follows.

Rob Dinerman, now entering his 17^th season on the pro doubles tour, has written the centerpiece article for every Maryland Club Open Tournament Program in the history of this tournament. His hardcover book “A History Of Harvard Squash, 1922-2010” was published by Millennium this past October and Volume II of “Selected Squash Writings”, a squash anthology, was recently listed onAmazon.com.

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 12^th 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.

This weekend will mark the 11th edition of the Maryland Club Open, making it the sixth longest-tenured event on the North American Doubles tour, and quite possibly the one that has seen the greatest number of changes and unexpected outcomes of any on the circuit during that considerable time span. Significant rivalries have either begun or had important chapters written, established powerhouses have been stopped dead in their tracks and budding stars have announced themselves, all within the confines of this host venue that has for so long been the flagship location of Maryland squash. Nearly every time this tournament takes place, something novel and/or noteworthy can be counted on to occur, often with lasting effects (given its October/November placement on the schedule) on the remainder of a given pro-doubles season or on the competitive dynamics of the pro doubles tour as a whole.

It is a revealing sign of how change-prone the results in this tournament have been over the years that, although Ben Gould and Damien Mudge, whose first tournament as teammates came in the 2010 version of this event, have won this championship in each of the last four years, the runners-up over that period have been the theoretical maximum of four different teams and eight different players. John Russell and Preston Quick in 2010 (four years after they similarly attained the final round in their own debut as partners in 2006), Matt Jenson and Clive Leach in 2011, Manek Mathur and Yvain Badan in 2012 and Imran Khan and Mark Chaloner in 2013 have been the respective second-place finishers during these years — no other stop of the SDA tour has had that much turnover in the silver-medal department over that stretch.

Either Mudge or Gould have made it to the winner’s circle in every Maryland Club Open in the event’s history, save for the 2007 edition, when Chris Walker and Clive Leach defeated first Mudge and Viktor Berg in the semis and then Gould and Paul Price in the final, in what turned out to be the last time until the end of the 2009-10 season (34 ranking ISDA events later) that a team other than either Price/Gould or Mudge/Berg wound up holding the championship trophy at the end of an ISDA event. Mudge, the pro doubles tour’s “all-time leading scorer” as the player who has recorded the most tournament wins during the 2000’s, also holds the record for the most Maryland Club Open titles, with seven (the first three with Gary Waite and, as noted, the last four with Gould), and he along with Gould (a six-time winner), Quick, Walker, Willie Hosey, Berg and Leach are the only participants in the 2013 tourney who also played in the inaugural Maryland Club Open a full decade earlier on Halloween weekend in 2003.

That first tournament was rocked by some early fireworks, especially in the earliest main-draw match Friday night, in which unheralded qualifiers Alex Pavulans and Chris Deratnay unceremoniously (and in straight games) ousted the heavily-favored Leach/Blair Horler pairing, whose overpowering performance at the season-culminating Kellner Cup the previous spring (where they had slugged their way to victory over reigning No. 1’s Waite and Mudge in the final) had marked them as the team to beat entering that 2003-04 season. Leach and Horler never fully regained their bravado, and a few months later Horler suffered a serious knee injury that ended their time as partners. In the years that followed his 2003 appearance with Horler, Leach would play the Maryland Club Open with Hosey in 2004, with Michael Pirnak in 2005, with Scott Butcher in 2006, with Walker in their triumphant march in 2007 and with Jenson in 2008 (six partners in six years). Price, his partner in the last two editions of thistournament, recently moved permanently back to his native Australia, so Leach’s well-established versatility will be put to the test yet again this weekend.
The tournament itself has evolved and grown impressively and on multiple fronts during the years since its inception, a tribute both to an enormously doubles-passionate club membership, which has from the outset both supported the event financially and populated a sizable number of pro-am draws, and more specifically to Doug Hoffberger, the host club’s Squash Committee chairman from 2003-2009 and the Tournament Chair from 2003-20013; Stewart Shettle, who succeeded Hoffberger as Squash Committee Chairman in 2009 and has held that position ever since; and Andrew Cordova, the host club’s head professional since 2000 after a prior six-year stint at the Baltimore Country Club, who was inducted into the Maryland Squash Hall Of Fame in April 2011 in recognition of his on-court competitive achievements, which include winning a modern-era record 10 Maryland State Open Level doubles titles (the last of them just this past spring with Dave Rosen as his left-wall partner) and a trio of victorious runs in the prestigious Baltimore Invitational Doubles Squash (BIDS) tournament.

Cordova was ranked as high as No. 18 on the circuit in 2007, and, in his capacity as SDA Director Of Development during the 2012-13 and 2013-14 seasons, his efforts resulted in the addition of a slew of new sites and a doubling of both membership and overall purse (to more than a half-million dollars last season) over that two-year period. Hoping to elevate his skills in this latter area to an even higher level, Cordova this autumn began taking online courses offered by Western Kentucky University in pursuit of a Master of Science degree in Recreation and Sports Administration, with a concentration in Event and Facility Management.

In addition to substantially increasing the purse and overall budget (for the pro-am flights as well as the Pro draw), the Maryland Club has always been receptive to changes and format refinements — in the 2002 BIDS event, for example, there was a hardball singles draw, whose final-match between Mudge and Waite had spectators thronging the bleacher area and standing five-deep — and this positive attitude has led to several innovations. In 2005, for example, and for the first time in the six-year history of the ISDA, the tournament paid the members of teams that were eliminated in the qualifying rounds, a reflection of Cordova’s wish to enhance the club’s reputation for hosting a player-friendly event, and of his belief that all professional players competing in a tournament of this stature deserve to be paid for their efforts. The hope (which ultimately did not materialize) at the time was that this practice would catch on at other ISDA sites as well.

In 2008, responding to the success that inner-city youth-enrichment education/squash organizations were having across the country, the Maryland Club Open partnered with the local Urban Squash program, Baltimore SquashWise, providing further incentive for member support for the Tournament and leading to a donation of several thousand dollars to the organization. Then, after a one-year hiatus in 2009 so that the Baltimore squash community could marshal its efforts to the U. S. National Doubles tournament that Charm City would be hosting in March 2010, the tournament resumed in dramatic fashion when it hosted not only the doubles tournament but also the inaugural U. S. leg of the Legends Of Squash tour that had been co-founded by John Nimick and Peter Nicol earlier that year.

Six of the former stars of the PSA singles circuit, namely Simon Parke, Jonathon Power, David Evans, Martin Heath, John White and Nicol himself, competed in two three-player Pools, with the respective winners then contesting the final. Nicol and White met in the final both that year and the next, with split results, and both years the Legends players seemed to spend much of their between-matches time in the doubles gallery following the action — indeed, one player tarried a little longer than he should have and almost missed his flight back to Europe. In 2010 as well, the Maryland Club Open began housing the tour players in hotels, a policy that has continued ever since and will finally be rewarded in its SDA ranking status this season due to a rules change passed over the summer in accordance with which “hospitality stars” augment the actual purse, resulting in Platinum status, normally reserved for $40,000 events, being given to this year’s $30,000 tournament.

Throughout the years as well, the club’s squash facilities have grown along with the tournament itself. Realizing the need for upgrading its facilities to respond to the growth of the overall program, the club devoted substantial capital expenditures to constructing a bar near the courts several years ago, expanding the gallery of the now glass-back-wall upper doubles court and replacing the painted floor on the lower court with a new natural-wood sprung floor with excellent traction and plenty of “give,” resulting in a much more enjoyable squash experience not only during the four-day tournament weekend but year-round.

The 2012 Maryland Club Open constituted the first-ever tournament for the newly-formed Squash Doubles Association (SDA) and the tour was christened that weekend in memorable fashion, with all but one of the seven main-draw matches either going to at least a fourth game or having one or more 15-14 tallies, as was also the case in five of the seven matches contested in the qualifying rounds. Two of the quarterfinal matches (Jenson/Quick over Russell/White and Price/Leach over Jonny Smith and Greg Park) wound up with 15-13 fifth-game tallies, and the final went to a fifth game as well before Gould and Mudge pulled away from mid-2000’s Trinity College teammates Mathur and Badan. Last year, Khan and Chaloner won a pair of five-gamers (over Price/Leach and Walker/Raj Nanda) en route to the final, and two of the other quarterfinals went the five-game limit as well. If history is any guide, the 2014 Maryland Club Open this coming weekend figures to provide more of the same in terms of both the tournament itself and its impact on the remainder of the 2014-15 SDA season.

Squash racquets came to the States from England in 1882 and was first played at St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH. The game arrived at the Maryland Club in 1928, seventy years after the founding of the Club and at a point midway between the two world wars.
One must realize that in 1858 when the Club was first organized it was a meeting place for gentlemen, and I do mean “gentlemen” in every sense of the word. Those old fellows literally basked in an ambiance of beautiful oriental rugs, dark paneling, the finest food in Baltimore, perhaps the best supply of oysters and terrapin in the whole area, generous drinks, pure white Irish linen, sparkling crystal, sterling silver, (even some gold place settings), priceless historical and sporting prints and paintings, Havana cigars, and a privacy that was almost sacred. The idea of ladies on the premises was not even a dream. As a matter of fact, when I first joined the Club I can remember an old friend telling me that the day he was elected a member his father resigned. Way back then some fathers felt that having a son in one’s club was a definite invasion of that very special privacy! So you can well imagine that the idea of having young squash players actually as members of the Club did not come easily.

The four wooden singles courts that were built in 1928 are still very much in use today. The courts, the galleries, the luncheon lounge (with the many championship boards listing the winners of the Club, State and National tournaments), the locker rooms, the shower facilities, and a small weight and workout area, all of this was built for a total cost of $75,000.00, and they got a $48,000.00 mortgage from the bank at 4½ percent!

Writing at the time, Carroll Dulaney noted humorously in his News Post column: “Time was when a gentlemen who measured less than 50 inches around the equator had some difficulty in joining the Maryland Club. It was not impossible, of course, but it devolved upon him to show that his leanness was hereditary, that his father and his grandfather before him had been cast in the same sylph-like mold. But we are living in a new and different age. Today the Club places marked emphasis upon its squash courts to keep you fit and your weight down. As a plain Baltimorean with an eye for beauty, I welcome the change. Soon the new Maryland Clubber will be as different from the old model-T as the dainty chorus girl of today differs from her grandmother of Billy Watson’s Beef Trust.”

Between 1921 and 1927 Lawrence Bailliere pretty much dominated the State singles championships and the next year when things got going at the Maryland Club he was still very much in evidence. Other names of that era were Frank Symington, Bill Cooney, Vernon Cook and John Bibby. Bill Lamblé did not join the Club until fairly late in his illustrious career, but his many State and Club Championships in both singles and doubles certainly merit calling those the Lamblé years. Prominent Club players of that time were Frank Gould, Alexander Harvey, and I even won a few myself. Next came the Lacy years with Jim Lacy gaining many singles titles in all sorts of tournaments and with his brother Joe (they were both left-handers) made up the top team in the Baltimore area for a long time. The only other “years” accolade goes to Sandy Martin who is perhaps the best doubles player the Club has ever produced. Sandy compiled an excellent doubles record at the National level and  also has a long string of State and Club singles and doubles wins to his credit. A.C. Hubbard and Jervis Finney are two other elder players who have piled up a lot of wins. This article is supposed to be historic in content and so I do sincerely apologize to the many, many fine, tough, young players who dominate the game today and who still keep the Maryland Club on top of the local squash scene.

In the old days we used to play the Naval Academy on a fairly regular basis, and, believe it or not, we usually won most of our team matches, but those guys stayed at the same age year after year and somehow or other we always seemed to be a year older! That competition has not been too active of late, but I feel strongly that our current young troops could easily start us off on another winning streak.
In 1969 Eddie Sheaffer was our first full-time professional and was a constant source of improvement to our games.

In 1965, thanks to the efforts of Rufus Williams, we got a really great doubles court and right now today we are starting work on two more singles courts (one with a glass back wall) and a second doubles court. In the beginning, the squash program worked its way up to approximately 50 season ticket holders. Today we have over 265. By the end of 1987 we will have 6 singles and 2 doubles courts, a whole bunch of older players, a lot in between, and most of all a real crowd of young, tough ones who will carry Maryland Club squash well into the 21st Century.

The Club can take great pride in its illustrious past, the retention of its fine old traditions and its firm adaptability to current times. The ladies now grace our Club with charm and respect and surely make it a finer place. The old gentlemen still play cards on their book-lined library room and the members’ bar remains a most exclusive sanctuary. At the same time, on our extremely active squash courts, a new breed of nautilus-minded gentlemen athletes guarantee the future of our Club for many generations to come.

The Maryland Club Open, which marks its tenth anniversary this weekend (there was a one-year hiatus in 2009 with Baltimore hosting the U. S. National Doubles the following spring), is already the sixth longest-tenured event on the North American pro doubles tour, trailing only the David Johnson Memorial event in Brooklyn, the North American Open, Boston, Wilmington and the Jim Bentley Cup in Toronto, all of whom have been stand-bys on the schedule for more than two decades. The Maryland Club courts have borne witness to some extraordinary results since its dramatic debut on Halloween night in 2003, by the end of which two of the top four seeds were sent packing and a third barely survived. Enough landscape-transforming trends were either stopped, marked or jump-started on Eager Street to have given the tournament a character and dynamic all its own, and on this landmark occasion it seems fitting to list them and elaborate on their impact on all that followed.

As noted, the very first main-draw match of the inaugural edition saw third seeds Blair Horler and Clive Leach, who had pounded and sharp-shot their way to the Kellner Cup title the previous spring, roaring back from a two-love deficit against long-time No. 1’s Damien Mudge and Gary Waite, promptly eliminated, in straight sets no less, by qualifiers Alex Pavulans and Chris Deratnay, following which almost immediately thereafter fourth seeds Josh McDonald and Viktor Berg were routed in their fifth game against Jamie Bentley and Preston Quick. Second seeds Willie Hosey and Michael Pirnak barely escaped a similar fate in their match with qualifiers David Kay and Chris Walker, who pushed the issue to 13-14 in the fifth before Kay rifled a forehand rail that rang loudly off the tin. Reprieved in this fashion, Hosey and Pirnak then beat Quick/Bentley in the semis before being over-run by Waite and Mudge in the final.

The latter tandem would repeat as champions both in 2004 (en route to going undefeated for that entire 2004-05 campaign) and 2005, when they would extend their string of consecutive-tournaments-won to 19 respectively (dating back to a January 2004 final-round loss in Boston to 2004 Maryland Club Open finalists McDonald/Berg), a skein that would end right here in Baltimore, as Quick and his new partner Ben Gould, who lost the 2005 final to Waite/Mudge, would reverse that outcome when the same two teams met just a few weeks later in the Big Apple Open final, where Gould and Quick would prevail, 15-14 in the fourth.

The next several versions of the Maryland Club Open saw results that would augur transforming changes in professional men’s doubles squash on this continent. In 2006 Waite and Mudge, who had enjoyed yet another dominant 2005-06 season, their seventh straight, won the first game of their semifinal match against new partners Gould and Price and stood at game-ball to go up two-love in the second, when Price delivered an untouchable inside-out forehand roll-corner that completely fooled Waite, after which Price/Gould romped through the remaining two games and rose superior to another new partnership, namely Quick and John Russell, in the final. Price and Gould would go on to a sensational 2006-07 season, winning a tour-leading five tournaments, including the Briggs Cup and North American Open, and displacing Mudge and Gould as the No. 1 team.

They therefore entered the 2007 Maryland Club Open, the second stop on the pro-doubles schedule that year, as imposing favorites, and their semifinal loss a few weeks earlier in St. Louis, when they had let a 2-1, 14-9 lead slip away in an eventual five-game loss to Leach and Chris Walker, was regarded as something of a fluke. They would get their chance at revenge when the two teams met Sunday afternoon in the final, in which Price and Gould earned a two games to one advantage and took a small lead in the fourth game as well. But Leach and Walker, semifinal winners a day earlier against debuting partners Mudge and Berg, came up with some compelling squash in the closing 15-12, 15-11 laps to capture their second consecutive ISDA title and briefly advance to the top spot in the rankings.

Remarkably, the two teams that Walker/Leach sequentially defeated that weekend in Charm City, namely Mudge/Berg and Price/Gould, would subsequently embark upon a run lasting all the way through the 2009-10 season, in which one or the other would win all 34 sanctioned ranking tournaments on the ISDA schedule during those nearly three years, with each winning 17 events. The two teams met in 17 of those 34 finals, with Price and Gould (who notched the 2008 Maryland Club Open with a final-round win over a Russell/Quick duo that had ousted Mudge and Berg in the semis) holding the slimmest possible 9-8 edge in what became the most enduring, intriguing and evenly matched rivalry in the history of the ISDA.

This two-team aristocracy might well have extended even longer were it not for the decision that Mudge and Gould reached during the summer of 2010 to join forces rather than continue their many years of beating each other’s brains out. An undefeated (12 for 12 tournaments, won-lost record of 38-0) 2010-11 season followed, though in their first-ever match of their partnership, a Maryland Club Open quarterfinal, Walker and Mark Chaloner took a 1-0, 7-4 lead. But Mudge and Gould would then blast their way through that game and the eight that followed (the last three coming in their final with Quick and Russell) and never looked back, culminating that season by winning the World Doubles in Toronto by surmounting one of their few late-match deficits in their final with Russell and Leach, who led two-one before being overtaken in the last two games.

Mudge and Gould would successfully defend the Maryland Club Open crown in 2011,which was played as a three-team round-robin, and 2012 (the debut event for the newly formed Squash Doubles Association, on which longtime Maryland Club head pro Andrew Cordova serves as Director Of Development), which for sheer depth of the competition at all levels of the draw may have been the most memorable holding of this tournament in its history. All but one of the seven main-draw matches either went to at least a fourth game or had one or more 15-14 tallies, as was also the case in five of the seven matches contested in the qualifying flights. Russell and former PSA No. 1 John White saved a third-game triple-match-point against them and wound up pushing Quick and his new partner Matt Jenson to 13-all in the fifth, at which juncture White unaccountably slipped to the floor in the middle of the ensuing exchange, costing his team that point and giving his opponents the momentum and another match-ball, which they promptly converted. Quick and Jenson then played Mudge and Gould (first-round 3-0 winners over Walker/Chaloner) much closer in the semis than the 15-9, 12 and 11 score implies, staying even through the first half of each game before the eventual champions made swift three- and four-point runs and closed each game from there.

The bottom half also had a 15-13 fifth-game denouement, this one involving a match-up between debuting teams; Greg Park and Jonny Smith won a 15-14 third game to go up 2-1 against Price and Leach, who, however, survived due to a winner off Price’s racquet at 14-13 in the fifth game. They then lost in four to Manek Mathur and Yvain Badan, whose first four evenly-divided games vs. Mudge and Gould were all decided by three points or less, but the latter pairing then raced out to a 7-1 lead in the fifth, sealing the 15-7 outcome.

Mudge has therefore won this tournament a record six times, its first three holdings with Waite and its last three with (now five-time champ) Gould sandwiching, however, three straight losses in the middle years in the semis, making the Maryland Club Open the only stop on the schedule in which Mudge has been stopped that many consecutive times short of the final. Gould has reached the last seven Maryland Club Open finals, with three different partners, namely Quick (a four-time finalist, including with Russell in 2006, 2008 and 2010) in 2005, Price for three-straight years from 2006-08 and Mudge the last three years. The Maryland Club Open has become a one of those stops that SDA players circle on the calendar, and a pivot point for the event-filled schedule that follows, and, if history is any guide, the 2013 edition will enhance the substantial tradition that the tournament has already firmly established.

Rob Dinerman has written the team profiles and major articles for every Maryland Club Open in the history of this tournament and his “History Of The U. S. National Doubles In Baltimore” was the feature article in the National Doubles Program when that event was held in Baltimore in March 2010. The winner of the Mitch Jennings Cup and the Tim Chilton Cup during the 2009-10 season (with Chris Walker and Ed Chilton as his respective partners), Dinerman was ranked as high as No. 10 on the WPSA pro hardball tour, winning more than 50 Open hardball tournaments and reaching the finals of the U. S. Nationals in 2004 and 2005. Currently the editor of the Dailysquashreport.com web site, he has been the major writer for the men’s SDA tour for the past 12 years and for the women’s WDSA tour throughout that organization’s six-year history. Excerpts from his prep-school memoir “Chasing The Lion,” as well as a number of his squash archival articles, can be found on his web site, www.robdinerman.com.

The much-ballyhooed debut was starting to veer far off course from the way they had planned it. Damien Mudge and Ben Gould, fierce rivals throughout the prior several years before deciding to join up during the summer just past, were rapidly and increasingly sliding into trouble in the first-ever match of their partnership, the opening-round quarterfinal of the 2010 Maryland Club Open, where they were being out-played by a slight but definite margin by Mark Chaloner and Chris Walker, who had taken a 1-0, 7-4 lead, their confidence growing with every passing point. Would the prohibitive top seeds, who between them had won every one of the 34 full-ranking pro doubles tournaments that had been played in the three years since the 2007 edition of this event, actually be bounced from the draw in the very first round? And if so, would they ever be able to recover from this rather noteworthy false start?

Two years, 61 wins (out of 62 matches) and 19 titles in 20 attempts later, Mudge and Gould enter this 2012-13 season — and this weekend — as the team to beat, having run off nine straight games to capture that 2010 Maryland Club Open title, which they successfully defended a year ago by overpowering both the Walker/Chaloner and Matt Jenson/Clive Leach pairings in a three-team round-robin invitational. It was by no means the first time that this tournament, now in its ninth holding — every year from 2003 onward, other than a one-year hiatus in 2009, since Baltimore hosted the U. S. National Doubles Championships that season — had provided the launch-pad for a major and enduring alteration of the dynamics of a professional doubles season or era.

When Mudge and Gary Waite captured the inaugural 2003 edition of this tourney (which began on a wild Halloween Friday night with qualifiers Alex Pavulans and Chris Deratnay straight-setting heavy favorites and reigning Kellner Cup champions Leach and Blair Horler), it jump-started a run of three straight Maryland Club Open titles and an equal number of years at No. 1. But when Gould and Paul Price ended that skein with a semifinal win over Mudge/Waite at this venue in October 2006, it signified the takeover that would follow, as Price/Gould would duplicate that result in the ensuing Big Apple Open, North American Open and Briggs Cup finals and finish that 2006-07 season as the No. 1 team.

There are additional similar phenomena associated with the degree to which performances in this tournament have set the tone for what comes afterwards, among them that Leach and Horler never fully recovered from their unexpected first-round 2003 ouster; that Preston Quick and John Russell began the first of their five praiseworthy seasons together (2006-11) by reaching the 2006 Maryland Club Open final, with 15 final-round advances (including in this event in both 2008 and 2010) to follow; and that Viktor Berg and Josh McDonald, first-round losers the year before, rocketed to the final of the 2004 Maryland Club Open en route to a season that saw them attain several other important finals, including that season’s Briggs Cup tourney.

Indeed, so many autumn results that have presaged the entire subsequent tour schedule have taken place right here in Charm City, that it seems poetically fitting that this brand-new Squash Doubles Association (SDA) tour, and the whole new era in men’s professional doubles on this continent that it represents, is being ushered in this weekend with the 2012 Maryland Club Open, the first full-ranking tournament of the 2012-13 SDA campaign. Certainly there are a number of entrants this weekend who with a variety of partners have played major roles in this tournament on multiple occasions — indeed, five of them, namely Mudge, Gould, Leach, Quick and Walker, have been part of this event literally from the moment of its 2003 inception.

But the more prevailing theme this year is how many new team alignments have emerged since the end of last season that are legitimately capable of challenging Mudge and Gould; this seems symbolized by the fact that The Champs, now as noted entering only their third full season as teammates, already have a longer-lasting partnership than that of any other team in the top tier of the tour.

Manek Mathur and Yvain Badan, who had to withdraw from the 2010 Maryland Club Open when the former’s playing hand was badly cut on a pane of glass, took a half-season hiatus this past winter/spring immediately after handing Mudge/Gould their sole defeat (in the semis of the mid-December Briggs Cup) and are rejoining forces this fall. Leach and Price are making their partnership debut this weekend after splitting a pair of five-gamers against each other in this Eager Street venue in 2007 and 2008. Greg Park and Jonny Smith have been partners only once prior to this upcoming season, a final-round advance (the first in full-ranking play for each of them) in Cleveland last winter featuring an exciting late-comeback semifinal win over Mathur and Leach. Jenson and four-time Maryland Club Open finalist Quick have played together two times before, the most recent of which was nearly two years ago, reaching the finals both times.

World rackets champion James Stout, who plans to make an enhanced commitment to this year’s tour after appearing only sparingly the past few years, and 2012 U. S. Mixed Doubles finalist (with Suzie Pierrepont) Greg McArthur have teamed up only once prior to this season, at the April 2011 Players Championship, when McArthur’s scheduled partner Dan Roberts injured a hamstring muscle. Stout proved so successful a pinch-hitter that weekend, during which he and McArthur reached the semis with sequential wins over Russell/Quick and Imran Khan/Steve Scharff, that the pair have decided to team up this season. There are plenty of other potentially contending team entries as well heading to downtown Baltimore, where, if history is any guide, what happens on these venerable (and recently renovated) courts may well prove to be a harbinger for the succeeding seven months of high-level athleticism and excitement.

Rob Dinerman has written the team profiles and major articles for every Maryland Club Open Program in the history of this tournament, and his “History Of The U. S. National Doubles In Baltimore” was the feature article in the National Doubles Program when that event was held in Baltimore in March 2010. The winner of two pro-am events, the Mitch Jennings Cup and Tim Chilton Cup during the 2009-10 season (with Chris Walker and Ed Chilton as his respective partners), Dinerman was ranked as high as No. 10 on the WPSA pro hardball tour, winning more than 50 Open hardball tournaments and reaching the finals of the U. S. Nationals in 2004 and 2005. He is currently the editor of theDailysquashreport.com web site and is the major writer for both the men’s SDA and women’s WDSA professional doubles tours. He recently released a memoir “Chasing The Lion: An Unresolved Journey Through The Phillips Exeter Academy,” excerpts from which, as well as a number of his squash archival articles, can be found on his web site, www.robdinerman.com.