WDSA Turner Cup Semis: Pierrepont/Krizek and Quick/Hewitt Charge Into Final   
by Rob Dinerman

Dateline May 17th --- Trailing 7-2 against a suddenly-aroused and higher-seeded opponent, Steph Hewitt and Meredeth Quick conjured up an inexorable 9-0 run, winning 13 of the match’s last 14 points to defeat Dana Betts and Alex Clark 15-6, 12 and 8 this afternoon at the Westchester Country Club in Rye in the semifinal round of the $30,000 Turner Cup, the flagship event of the entire WDSA pro women’s doubles season. Hewitt and Quick will now face top seeds Suzie Pierrepont and Narelle Krizek, straight-set winners as well today (15-10, 11 and 11 over Tarsh McElhinny and Karen Jerome), on Sunday afternoon at 2 PM in the final. These two teams have been battling for WDSA supremacy for a number of years now and they have split their two prior Turner Cup final-round match-ups, with Pierrepont and Krizek winning in 2008 and Quick and Hewitt getting their revenge in 2012. The teams clashed just last month in the John’s Island Open in Florida, with Krizek and Pierrepont prevailing in a close four games, which marked the eighth straight tournament win for them, dating back to their last loss, to Quick/Hewitt in the 2012 Turner Cup final.

    Even though Pierrepont and Krizek trailed Jerome/McElhinny 9-5 in both the second and third games today, one always had the sense that they could cut out the errors and impose their substantially superior weaponry whenever they needed to, as indeed turned out to be the case. Krizek scored in any number of ways, from some nick-finding three-walls to tight reverse-corner and shallow rails, while Pierrepont volleyed fearlessly and effectively enough to keep their opponents scurrying to the corners much of the time. Though the Pierrepont/Krizek duo ran off seven straight points from 5-9 to 12-9 in closing out the third game, they will have to play at that level of quality much more consistently in the final if they plan on beating Quick/Hewitt, who were a model of efficiency, both defensively and offensively, throughout their match with first-time partners Betts and Clark. Quick was retrieving amazingly well and she committed fewer than five tins the entire match and Hewitt was almost her equal on both fronts and was coming up with numerous winners as well.

    Betts and Clark, trailing 1-0, 10-3, played their best squash at the end of the second game and the beginning of the third, creeping back from way behind to get to 12-14 in the second, in part on the strength of two wall-hugging Betts drives that Quick couldn’t return and some nervy corner winners off Clark’s bat. But at 12-14, Clark hit a cross-court that foul-tipped the back wall on its way out of court, the kind of near-miss that to some degree typified their performance all afternoon. They did, as noted, get out to a 7-2 lead in the third game, but a Clark tin on a reverse-corner was followed swiftly by two front-court winners by Quick, and, just like that, a devastating 13-1 sprint to the tape was on.

     Most of the points became long, all-court exchanges, high on exertion and entertainment value and frequently evenly contested – except for the fact that all but one of them wound up in the Quick/Hewitt column. Between them they were covering the entire court, hitting low-risk yet pressuring shots, committing ZERO tins, and basically giving their opponents no place to go. Clark in particular seemed to sag in the face of the unrelenting Quick/Hewitt attack, being forced further and further out of position. Tomorrow’s match-up, in the most important tournament on the WDSA schedule and featuring the two top teams on the WDSA circuit playing for the biggest purse of the season, should be a fitting culmination to what has been an exciting 2013-14 season.




 

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