Steph Hewitt And Narelle Krizek Capture Inaugural BMO Canadian Pro Women’s Squash Doubles Championship by Rob Dinerman
photos courtesy James Hewitt
Dateline October 24th ---
Top-tier women’s pro doubles returned to Canada this past weekend for
the first time in the five and a half years since the 2011 World
Doubles when the $25,000 BMO Canadian Pro Women’s Squash Doubles
Championships were held at the Toronto Cricket Skating & Curling
Club. Back then Steph Hewitt and her Canadian compatriot Seanna Keating
won a riveting five-game final against Narelle Krizek and her sister
Tarsh McElhinny. This time Hewitt and Krizek were partners rather than
opponents, making their first appearance as teammates since they swept
to victory in the 2014 U. S. National Doubles in New York. They fully
duplicated their success of 31 months ago with a four-game semifinal
win over Tina Rix and Latasha Khan, following which they defeated
first-time partners Dana Betts and Fernanda Rocha 15-9, 15-6, 9-15,
15-10 in the Saturday-night final before a Cricket Club gallery that
was packed to the rim by club members who later that evening
participated in the Squash Opening Party to kick off the new season.
The main presenting sponsor was BMO Wealth Management, with supporting
sponsors including Chestnut Park Realty, Medcan Health Care, Specops,
Harrow Sports, Porter Airlines and BDO Tax Advisory.
Rocha, just two weeks removed from winning a pro
Mixed Doubles invitational tournament in St. Louis with her former
Trinity College contemporary Manek Mathur, and Betts had won pre-final
matches over first Nikki Todd and Marci Sier and then McElhinny and
Meredeth Quick, who led two games to one and 7-3 in the fourth, only to
then fall victim to a 10-point burst throughout which Betts and Rocha
commandeered the front part of the court and pounded a series of
shallow winners. Quick and McElhinny then staged a late-game rally of
their own but were undone by a pair of tins that caused them to come up
just short at 15-13. Thus reprieved, Betts and Rocha earned a mid-game
lead in the fifth which they never relinquished en route to a 15-7
ticket to the final.
In the bottom half of the six-team draw, Rix and
Khan out-played Keating and Amy Milanek, and took the second game of
their Krizek/Hewitt semi before Krizek in particular went off on a
shooting spree that, buttressed by Hewitt’s steady error-free play,
enabled the eventual champs to close out the match with competitive but
convincing 15-9, 15-11 tallies. They then grabbed those two
single-figure opening games in the final before Betts and Rocha took
advantage of a slight letdown by their opponents and came away with the
third game. The first portion of the fourth game was evenly contested,
but Hewitt and Krizek were able to assert themselves during the last
dozen exchanges, with a Krizek backhand three-wall nick at
championship-point serving as a fitting calling-card for a match during
which she hit substantially more winners than anyone else on the court.
Tournament Co-Chairs James Hewitt and Doug Mackay arranged for the
final to be broadcast by Rogers Cable Television to cap off a night in
which three Pro-Am finals, all named in honor of major tournament
sponsors, were also contested. Rix and Barb Robinson took the
Specops Cup and there were also two Mixed Doubles pro-ams, namely the
BDO Cup, which was won by Quick and Gary O’Neill, and the Chestnut Park
Cup, which went to Todd and Carlo Mariglio.
The women generously decided to donate all of their Pro-Am
winnings to the Canadian Breast Cancer Association, which helped raise
$20,000 for this designated official tournament charity, All
told, the three-day extravaganza constituted a praiseworthy and
memorable launch-pad to both the doubles season in Toronto and to the
2016-17 WSDA pro women’s doubles tour, and it ended in feel-good
fashion, with all 12 WSDA players entering the court immediately after
the last ball was struck and receiving a prolonged standing ovation
from the gallery in appreciation of how hard and how well every one of
them had played.
