By Richard Millman, Owner – The Squash Doctor Corporation
Languages, cultures, pursuits, attitudes, personalities—all can be reduced to their constituent parts. But once we have taken them to pieces, we need to be very careful when attempting to reconstitute them, so that the sum of the parts is at least equal to the original whole—and not some entirely different entity.
What is my meaning here in regard to Squash?
Languages, cultures, pursuits, attitudes, personalities—all can be reduced to their constituent parts. But once we have taken them to pieces, we need to be very careful when attempting to reconstitute them, so that the sum of the parts is at least equal to the original whole—and not some entirely different entity.
What is my meaning here in regard to Squash?
Simply that when we break the game down to study it, we must do everything in our power to make sure that we don’t incorrectly emphasize some of the game’s components to the detriment of others and indeed of the game in its entirety.
Squash is an organic, evolving game. It is many faceted and all of its facets must cooperate in a seamless flow. If we break it down to separate parts and practice them individually and in isolation, we are in danger of changing the importance of those component parts and indeed of accidentally reordering the sequence in which they were originally combined prior to analysis and breakdown.
Squash offers an opportunity that is rare in modern life: Exposure and practice of the skills and instincts of survival. Yes — of Life and death itself.
Let me explain. In modern life, we humans have become complacently secure. No longer do we feel the need to keep our guard up every instant that we are awake. Gone are the days that we dared not step out of the cave in the morning without carefully checking for danger. No more do we rely on our peripheral awareness to constantly scan our environment for danger that our direct/primary focus doesn’t immediately perceive.
Except that in Squash, these are precisely the skills and tools that are required to survive.
However, when we break the sport down and over-emphasize certain parts of the game, we interfere with those essential survival skills.
Devices and advice that are intended to help with our defense, such as the concept of ‘getting back to the T’, or advising the use of certain approach pathways (such as the Banana discussed in a previous article) actually have the opposite effect to the one intended. The advice of ‘getting back to the T’ is intended to afford the recipient of the advice of equateral ability to recover any ball—no matter where it is struck. But, in point of fact, the advice distracts the recipient’s primary attention from the ball and directs their physical, mental and emotional attention toward the T—thereby creating a disconnect between player and ball at precisely the moment that the opponent is likely to strike the ball. However well intentioned, any coach or player that emphasizes ‘getting back to the T’ is doing serious damage to their student. Equally, advising a player to follow a certain movement pattern that is not based on the specific moment by moment relationship with the ball, simply guarantees that the student will focus on the movement pattern and will lose their connection with the ball while directing their primary focus to the shape or pattern advised. Far from helping, it actually removes the student ever farther from the essential continuous mental physical and emotional contact with the ball. To improve your movement, you must first develop the ability to maintain an absolute and continuous primary focus on the ball. After all, the ball is essential to your survival—no different to the way that hunting and killing prey is essential to the life of a leopard. You wouldn’t see a leopard, who is ‘locked on’ to an antelope, allowing its mental, physical or emotional focus to become distracted—unless by some other life threatening event like the arrival of a lion. Bar the arrival of another threatening predator, the leopard must maintain an absolute connection with the antelope. Without that connection, the leopard cannot efficiently hunt and kill the antelope; the antelope would escape. Enough failed hunts and the leopard will not survive. Equally, without an absolute connection to the ball, you will not successfully ‘hunt’ the ball. Enough failed hunts and you will not survive (only a game, perhaps, but precisely the same instincts and abilities are in use).
How then do we maintain an equilateral defense of the court? In the same way that the leopard maintains a high level of awareness of his environment when his primary focus is on the prey. With highly developed peripheral awareness. By feel.
Hunting prey is a far more conscious process than the process of keeping up a peripheral awareness of your environment. Maintaining peripheral sensitivity is a far more sub-conscious process. Of course, if you don’t practice it, even your sub conscious defensive mechanisms will become dull and ineffectual. Your ‘guard’ will ‘drop’, making you vulnerable.
If the leopard drops its peripheral ‘guard’ it stands a good chance of being killed by any lion, hyena, buffalo, elephant or crocodile that happens to approach it in the periphery while it is primarily focused on the antelope it is hunting.
Equally, a Squash player who fails to maintain an awareness of where they are on the court while they are focused primarily on their prey (the ball) will be vulnerable. So position is essential. But you must learn to position by feel, not by shifting your focus from the ball toward some arbitrary spot that you have been told is the place to be.
Think of the effect that a coach unintentionally creates when they direct a player to the ‘T’. We have already mentioned the immediate loss of focus on the ball. How about the connotation of security that the ‘T’ wrongly provides when someone is told that it is ‘the place to be?’ The poor student dutifully moves to the piece of Red or Blue paint that they have been ordered to attain and what do they do when they get there? Quite naturally they experience relief and a feeling of well-being, having completed the task they were given. Surely they can relax now that they have gained this position of command? Feeling that they are in the ‘right’ place they immediately begin to let the all important life sustaining peripheral sense of awareness shut down. They drop their guard… as they have reached the place of safety.
This equates to the leopard attaining safety from a pride of lions by gaining the top the tree and failing to keep up its guard—only to be killed by a lion who has climbed the rocks that overhang the tree and who has jumped down on the leopard— who failed to properly continue to check the safety of the entire environment.
When a Squash player is directed to go to the T, the hunting reflex—essential for survival—relaxes. When the opponent steals up behind and plays an unexpected early drop volley before the player reaches the T, the player who uses the T concept is powerless to retrieve the ball—their mind body and soul being primarily focused on a piece of red paint behind them, whilst the ball is merrily on its way to the front of the court. They may even see the ball struck, but with their body weight and interest firmly focused on what their coach said was the best thing to do, they are powerless to respond.
Squash doesn’t work when we use our conscious minds to follow prescribed directions, no more than we as a species could survive using our conscious minds to deal with life and death—survival—scenarios. Imagine you are walking across a main road day dreaming and suddenly you look round and a truck is coming at you. What are you going to rely upon to survive? Your conscious mind. Or your unconscious survival instincts? The answer is obvious.
