2005 SAL Santa Barbara Open

Robert Graham, SBAC Squash Professional

For the past 11 years SBAC has held a Men’s Professional squash tournament in aid of the Santa Barbara Sheriff's Department DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program. In that time we have donated over $450,000 to DARE just from the tournament. The Santa Barbara Sheriff's Department has recently replaced their DARE program with The Sheriff's Activities League (SAL) which provides extra-curricular activities for under-privileged “at risk” kids - we hope to add squash to this program in the near future.

This year's Santa Barbara Open Squash Tournament was held last month with all the proceeds benefiting SAL. As in the past there was a $10,000 Men’s Pro event, featuring 16 Professional players from all over the world, all the usual amateur divisions, and some fun social events. The number of amateurs competing was just 50, but all tournaments seem to be down on numbers recently.

Shahier Razik, from Canada, currently ranked #39 in the world, was seeded #1 for the Pro event, while Eric Galvez from Mexico (world #54) was #2. Despite some tough matches on the way through, it was indeed these top two seeds who contested the final – and what a final! The match see-sawed one way and then the other as each player tried to force the play their way. Razik was playing a slow retrieving game while Galvez was taking the ball early and attacking at every opportunity. It went to a fifth and deciding game in which Razik prevailed 11/5 in a record-breaking 2 hours 12 minutes. This is the longest match on record since men’s professional squash changed from scoring each game to 15 points down to 11 a little over a year ago.

Former SBAC member, Paul Roberts, had the easiest final of the day in the Men’s 5.5 division, when his opponent, SBAC’s own unreliable Christian Geitner, failed to show up for the match. Also from the home club, Debbie Brown won the Men’s 4.5 final 3-0 against Joe Mersola from Burbank. Santa Barbara’s Dirk Reynolds played well to make it through to the Men’s 4.0 final but couldn’t quite pull off another good win, going down 3-1 to Basil Amer of LA. Nathalie Tremuel-Fourel from San Francisco beat Reno’s Gary Silverman 10-8 in the ffith in the final of the 3.5 division. In the 60+ division Santa Barbara’s Jeff Lipshitz and Basil Honikman took 2nd and 3rd place respectively, neither player quite being able to compete with several time former national champion, Bob Hanscom from the LAAC. The Junior division went yet again to 11 year old Ben Reisman, who won the 6 player round robin without dropping a game against all local opposition.

The accounting for the tournament is still being finalized but we hope to make another significant contribution to SAL this year.

Click here to see all of the final results.