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.
