National Urban Letter from Bill Simon and Tim Wyant December 24, 2013
Dear Friends,
Almost 19 years after
SquashBusters was founded in Boston, urban squash continues to grow
stronger. Over 1,400 urban youth are now enrolled in 15 programs across
the country, the most recent additions being in Oakland, Cleveland, and
Newark. Together, NUSEA programs employ over 100 staff and have
operating budgets that total more than $7 million. Five programs have
built or renovated their own squash facilities, and San Diego and
Chicago will soon break ground on multimillion dollar youth centers.
The power of urban
squash lies in the individual relationships that are formed over many
years - between coaches and players, tutors and students, mentors and
mentees - and a program culture that promotes hard work and academic
achievement. Over 95% of the students who stay in our programs go to
college, as 140 now do at Bates, Dartmouth, Harvard, Northwestern,
Penn, Trinity, UC Berkeley, and other schools.
In 2013 NUSEA
organized and funded 10 national tournaments and training squads that
brought 500 students to the campuses of Harvard, Kenyon, Northeastern,
Williams, Yale, and Deerfield Academy. NUSEA partnered with Phillips
Exeter Academy, sending 10 of our most accomplished students to its
5-week summer school. We continued to collect data from our member
programs and facilitate the sharing of information between
organizations. In addition to organizing a two-day conference that
brought 70 urban squash staff to Philadelphia in October, NUSEA
launched a peer-led member program review process that included site
visits and data analysis and will conclude with a series of
recommendations in early 2014. With these and other initiatives, our
goal has been to support member programs and help them become stronger
organizations.
NUSEA also invested
time and resources in creating new urban squash programs. We worked
with groups in Hartford and Cincinnati, helping them form facility and
school partnerships, recruit board members, and secure funding.
Hartford and Cincinnati will launch in the fall. We engaged with
several other cities as well, including Pittsburgh, and plan to launch
our first international start-up late next year in Cartagena, Colombia.
Partly due to the success of our model, similar programs now operate in
Johannesburg, Toronto, and Chandigarh, India. We plan to partner with
those organizations and support them in much the same way we do current
member programs.
In a little over a
year, during the weekend of January 17, 2015, NUSEA will bring together
the whole urban squash community - students, alumni, staff, supporters,
partners - to celebrate Urban Squash's 20th Anniversary, a two-day
event in New York City that will be held in conjunction with the
Tournament of Champions and the Urban Squash Team Nationals. We hope
you mark your calendars and join us for the occasion.
For now, please
continue to support the urban squash program in your community. And if
there is not a program in your city, let's change that.
Thank you for your support and all the best in 2014.
