Dane Sharp Triumphs At “Hardball Free For All” Event At Merion
by Rob Dinerman




photos courtesy Whitney Thain

Dateline October 24th --- This past weekend the Merion Cricket Club in suburban Philadelphia hosted a “Hardball Free For All” tournament that served as the launch-pad for the 2016-17 hardball season. Dane Sharp, an assistant pro at Merion who won the U. S. National Hardball Championship at this same venue eight months ago in a riveting five-game final against Imran Khan, again demonstrated his mastery in the six-player Open division with straight-set wins first in his semifinal match with Baldwin School head coach Richard Glanfield and then in the final over his Merion pro staff colleague Fabio Cechin, who had straight-gamed two-time National Hardball finalist Rob Dinerman in the bottom-half semi.

   Glanfield rebounded from his setback to take the 40’s/50’s final in five games over Joseph Purazzella, and  there were two other age-group categories as well, namely the 55’s/60’s, in which Peter Stokes prevailed in three over Eric Berger (whose five-game semis win over Henry Steinglass reversed their outcome in the 2016 Nationals 70’s final), and the 65’s/70’s, in which Paul Chan demonstrated the fullness of her recovery from arthroscopic knee surgery this past spring by out-playing Tefft Smith in a 3-0 final. There was also a B round-robin, in which Gerard Maddrey took first-place honors and Peter Landreth finished second. The fact that more than two-dozen players turned out for a tournament that was organized on fairly short notice by Merion’s Director Of Athletics Whitney Thain is a clear sign of the hardball players’ resolve to support their sport throughout the season, regardless of US Squash’s recent edict not to recognize national hardball champions beginning with the current season. There are a dozen events scheduled to take place this fall and winter, and the mood of the weekend was perhaps best summarized by Thain when she commented afterwards that, “Lots of hardball played this weekend, everyone just kept playing.”