The MSA Spring League finished up last night at the club with the conclusion of our end-of-session tournament. Finalists Don "The Stork" Breckbill, and Len Widra playing out the final in front of a capacity* crowd on the show court. It looked as if Don was going to walk away with the championship in three games with his shot making and much improved court coverage. Impressive front court volley drops hurt his opponent, but Len wasn't helping himself at all with an impressive number and variety of tins. Not to be bull-dozed, staring down the barrel of three match-balls in the third, Len bravely dug in, tightened up his game, forced Don into the back corners to push the match into a fourth.
The fourth was all Don though. With a lot of hard work (and a lot of huffing and puffing by both players) Don was able to keep Len behind him, hit an incredible number of winners from impossible angles, and force enough errors from his opponent's racquet to take home the title and a fancy MSW T-Shirt for his efforts.
All players enjoyed pizza and local brews provided by the Madison Squash Association and otherwise had a great time.
All in all, the format of the league this time seemed to go over pretty well with the players. We'll take a few weeks off and kick off another session later in the summer.
In addition to our weekly league, coming soon to Madison Squash Workshop is a Box League. Players are placed in a box group of 5 or 6 players. You get a month to play all players in your group, The players with the best records move up a group, the worst records move down, and the people in the middle stay in their group. Not sure when we'll start that, but that's easy enough to coordinate and run just about any time. The key is participation at all levels so that appropriate matches happen week in and week out. We have enough members from beginner to expert that getting appropriate matches shouldn't be a problem.
*By "capacity," I mean that the 10 people who watched the final had eaten pizza until capacity.
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