Damico and Schnugg Earn Wimbledon Doubles Title

The patches of green in the parched courts of American tennis at Wimbledon this year were confined to male doubles, but the U.S. did claim two championships over the weekend. On Saturday the Bryan brothers won their first Wimbledon men's doubles title, completing the career Grand Slam and on Sunday, Kellen Damico and Nate Schnugg captured their first junior slam title with a 7-6 (7), 6-2 victory over the Slovak team of Martin Klizan and Andrei Martin. Wimbledon.org has an account of the finals here.


Damico and Schnugg, both 17, were doubles finalists in Australia this year, but didn't play together at Roland Garros. Childhood friends who have been doubles partners for years, Damico and Schnugg were not seeded at Wimbledon. The ITF has chosen to continue its practice of seeding doubles by combining the individual rankings of the pair, which discounts entirely the experience and teamwork facets of the game. When the draw came out and Damico and Schnugg got the top seeded team of Thiemo de Bakker and Alexandre Sidorenko in the first round, I thought to myself that it was a tough draw--for both teams. And although they didn't have a straight set match until the final, Damico and Schnugg proved that a seed is only as good as the information being used to decide it. Last year, the U.S. team of Jesse Levine and Michael Shabaz also won the Wimbledon title unseeded, and were not seeded at the U.S. Open, a scenario that could again play out this year.

But Schnugg has a decision to make, as he has also had great success playing with Jamie Hunt this year--winning the Grade A Banana Bowl this spring and reaching the finals at the Grade A Italian Open. But before the U.S. Open comes Kalamazoo, where the main draw wild card to the U.S. Open is at stake. It will be interesting to see who is playing whom next month.

The girls title went to the second seeds Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova and Alisa Kleybanova of Russia. Pavelyuchenkova won the first two girls' Grand Slam doubles titles of 2006 with Canadian Sharon Fichman, but with Fichman not playing at Wimbledon, the fifteen-year-old found herself another two-time Grand Slam doubles champion in Kleybanova, who won the 2003 Wimbledon Junior title and last year's U.S. Open Junior title. Like Viktoria Azarenka last year, Pavlyuchenkova will arrive at the year's final junior championship with a chance for the doubles slam. Azarenka's attempt was derailed by her partner's injury; Pavlyuchenkova may want to consider health when deciding on a teammate.