What's On My Mind

Multitudes:  Reflections on the Squash Summit
by A. J. Kohlhepp

October 21, 2015

In a recent trip to Philadelphia, America’s de facto squash capitol, I was reminded of how, in a certain sense, this truly global sport inhabits a very small community in the United States.

Nowhere was this small sport / big world dichotomy more evident than in the Ben Franklin conference rooms in the basement of the Sheraton University City, host venue for The Squash Summit, ably facilitated by Adam Hamills and Bill Buckingham. There to present on the topic of “rural squash,” based on my experience with an outreach program called Green Mountain Squash, I ran into a great many people I knew. 

There was Chris Gordon, America’s current #1 male professional, with whom I played a spirited soccer game at Williams College a couple of summers ago. Gordon was attending as part of the Public Squash Foundation, a consortium looking to put up portable outdoor courts in a variety of New York City parks.  Their efforts involved the design team at ASB, the renowned court manufacturer, whom I also got to parley with as my own school is on the cusp on a major renovation of our squash facilities.

ASB were not the only construction game in town, however, as the Power Courts team seized the conversational “T” when opportunities arose.  As it turns out, Sam Beatt, their director of client relations, is a Taft graduate against whom I coached, once upon a time. Beatt happens to be close friends with a Berkshire School alum who was a member of my team in the early aughts; this alum’s family has been in conversation with our school about a gift to defray the costs of court construction in the short term and, in the longer term, to endow a scholarship for urban squash players to attend our school. 

That same Berkshire alum also managed to connect me with Steve Gregg, the executive director of SquashSmarts, the Philadelphia-based urban program that may someday send team members to join us at Berkshire School.  In yet another small-world twist, both Sam at Power Courts and Steve at SquashSmarts happen to be Taft graduates. And Steve and I share an alma mater as well, having both attended Trinity College, whose men’s and women’s coaches both happened to be in attendance at the Summit.  

I heard from a presenter named Barrett Takesian, a Bowdoin graduate who played with Stephan Danyluk, with whom I once coached in the summer camps at – you guessed it -- Williams College. Takesian is attempting to build an impressive public facility through Portland Community Squash, and he and I traded some notes about ways to hybridize elements of urban squash programs, college facilities and private clubs in the quest for sustainable local configurations. 

The connections continued to reveal themselves even after I had left Philadelphia behind.  Back at Berkshire a mere twenty-four hours after connecting with Takesian, I found myself stepping on court with Jose Rivera, a Berkshire alum with whom Takesian overlapped at SquashBusters.  Rivera had returned to SquashBusters as a coach and administrator, having come through in the early years, as Takesian was starting SquashBusters’ satellite program in Lawrence. 

The connectivity also spans cultures and continents, as I shared ideas with Celia Allamargot, a French national and former top-100 professional, about different models to integrate school facilities and the squash-playing (and paying) public.  Celia has taken over the program at The Convent of the Sacred Heart, a girls’ school in squash-crazy Greenwich, CT, against whom my own teams have battled in recent seasons (and mostly lost).   And I recognized another international rackets aficionado, the Brazilian squash advocate Carlos Paiva, whose daughter attended rival school Williston-Northampton and thus competed against my own teams many times over the years.

Even the hotel itself helped convey a sense of the smallness of the sport, as I rode elevators and loitered in lobbies with club owners and teaching pros, court construction firms and match commentators, world-class athletes and their devoted support teams. I was even lucky enough to cross paths with Vanessa Atkinson, former top player and current commentator, who once signed a program for me and my red-haired toddler daughter (who has maintained her hair color but lost all interest in squash) in a post-match respite at Apawamis.
 
But the staggeringly few degrees of separation that we were enjoying at the Squash Summit should not be taken to represent any sort of unanimity terms of visions or values.  I was there, after all, as a proxy for ten novice squashers from rural Vermont, an infinitesimal number in relation to the 1,000,000+ participants that Kevin Klipstein and U.S. Squash tally nationally, not to mention the loyal legions playing the game around the globe. 

Those wide variations in participation numbers mirror similarly scaled discrepancies in funding. The annual operating budget for Green Mountain Squash rests comfortably in the four-figure range, while NYC’s Public Squash Foundation were looking to raise more than ten times that amount just to set up a single temporary court.  And neither of these groups stood to make any money out of the sport itself, unlike current professionals, teaching pros, equipment and court manufacturers, club owners and the like in attendance, all of whom depend upon public interest for their livelihood.  This seemingly small sport then, like Walt Whitman’s persona, seems to “contain multitudes.” 

Perhaps the key question for Kevin Klipstein and company to consider, as they look to grow the game across the United States in the years to come, is how to best harness the potential of the “multitudes” who love the game today and who may come to love it in the future.  This can be tricky business, to maintain the traditional sense of community that squash enjoys among the East Coast establishment while banking on the immediate thrills that a racket and ball can generate in any corner of the country.  If the collective brainpower and passion on display at the Squash Summit are any indication, the future looks pretty promising.