Will’s World Summer Camp

By Will Carlin

I am an idiot. Seriously.

It all started when I got an email from the coach I have been working with, Julian Wellings. The first line of the email said, “You’re crazy enough to do this!” The email was a forward from someone named Damon Leedale-Brown, and I scrolled down to read the original.

Damon is a coach who has been involved in squash since the age of 12 as a player, coach and training specialist. In addition to holding squash’s top coaching certification level, Damon has specialized in sports science and conditioning and its application to squash. I found out later that over the past ten years he helped prepare seven world championship winning teams and three individual world champions.

This is interesting, I thought, so I read on.

Damon decided that this summer he would enter into the highly competitive US summer squash camp arena. But his camp would be one with a difference: there would be almost no time spent on actual squash courts. Instead, Damon decided to locate his camp at altitude near Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado and focus on 11 days of intensive training for squash.

I continued further and finally found a paragraph that read as follows: “Basically I am looking to get a group of seven or eight players who could be older junior players, players just out of juniors or on their way to college, players at college, and young touring pros.” Well, I thought, back in the day…

Since I didn’t qualify on any of these points, I asked Julian why he sent me the email. He laughed and said that I must not have read the next sentence, which said, “[the camp] may also be of interest to a good club player who is just mad keen on squash and into their fitness and health in a big way!”

Yeah, right, I thought, trying to keep up with teenagers on fitness? That would be fairly ridiculous. But I was intrigued, and I decided to call Damon and chat with him.

He was as surprised as I was that I was calling. During our conversation, he told me that he was planning to work on endurance conditioning by exploring different types of running sessions (steady runs, fartleks and interval based sessions) on both hills and the track. He also mentioned speed and speed-endurance training (whatever that is); agility, footwork and explosive movement; functional conditioning for squash; and yoga, Pilates and other sports-specific stretching techniques.

“We will go through in detail how to perform these sessions, we’ll look at structured ways to apply progressive overload to each session, and we will do some mountain biking on easy technical trails to add variety and some fun cross-training.”

Oh yeah. Sounded like a blast.

Thinking about summer camp summons up memories of campfires, s’mores, and short-sheeting the counselor’s bed. But the fact that Damon also mentioned that nutrition counseling was part of the experience rules out the s’mores, I think.

The whole thing was interesting, I thought, but it would be suicide for someone my age to try all this. I actually liked the idea of attending a junior-based squash camp as an adult camper, but it would be fairly moronic to try one that was completely oriented around fitness. However, since you already read the first sentence of this article, you know that I am not touting myself as
being intelligent.

T.S. Eliot was right: “April is the cruelest month… mixing memory with desire.” What other explanation is there for the fact that, before I really knew what I was doing, I was enrolled in a summer squash camp for kids? I am 44 years old.

I knew I would need to train to be ready for the camp, so I started immediately. And just as quickly, I did something to my right ankle.

It has kept me off the court and mostly out of the gym for about five weeks now. And camp is only three weeks away. So, the age thing already is making its point… and the point seems to be that it is not going to cooperate (“you should have consulted with us first, big guy”).

But sometimes you have to push, and this is one of those times. I figure if that girl from American Pie can get friends by starting off sentences with “This one time, at band camp,” I gotta be able to find a use for “squash camp.”

Assuming I can still write after the camp, there will be a whole article about my camp experience. You will see first-hand how dumb I was. (And I promise to tell you about any short sheeting, too.)