By James Zug
Neal Tew is the purveyor of a new method of developing squash: the nonprofit club.
Tew grew up playing at the Cincinnati Country Club. He was one of Don Mills’ protégés. The class of 1993 at Harvard, Tew was a part of two national championship teams; his senior year he captained the Crimson to an undefeated regular season before they lost to Princeton in the finals of the nationals 5-4.
After graduating with a degree in English literature, Tew moved to Paris, Boston and then Washington, DC (in Paris he played league; in DC he played No. 1 on Washington’s Fitzgerald Cup team and coached briefly at Results, the squash club on Capitol Hill). He also studied theology and lived in a French monastery for a year as he contemplated the monastic life. He returned to the States and in 2004 earned a masters degree in philosophy from Catholic University. He then moved back to Cincinnati, got married and he and his wife promptly had four children. Setting aside the airy thoughts of faith and philosophy, Tew in 2007 launched Phalanx Advisors, a financial planning firm.
But he kept returning to squash, as he saw an opportunity for growth in junior squash in southwest Ohio. “There was just one junior program, the one I grew up in at the Cincinnati Country Club,” Tew said. “I wanted to open it up to a broader audience in town. I first started by experimenting with what was there.” In September 2009 he started junior programs on two courts at a Life Time Fitness Club in Mason, OH, and then later on two courts at the University Club of Cincinnati and two at the Queen City Racquet Club. He hired pros and created junior programs that began to thrive.
The next step was getting a large facility to consolidate the programs. On the eastside of town, Tew discovered a thirty-five year-old racquetball facility. In April 2012 he bought it and gutted most of the building. With the help of a US SQUASH grant for converting racquetball courts to squash, he ended up with three twenty-one foot courts and two twenty-footers. Immediately next door is the Cincinnati Sports Club which has three twenty-foot courts. When T Squash Center opened in January 2013, it could claim eight courts and thus boast being the largest squash facility not only in Ohio but the entire Midwest.
The T looks like a regular health club: there are Tuesday evening men’s clinics and women’s squash at nine in the morning; a core training studio; spinning bikes. And plenty of two-tier viewing, especially with the three softball courts. Yet, it is set up as a 501 (c) 3 public charity. “It made sense for what we are doing,” Tew said. “The bottom dollar at sports clubs, the square footage—it’s tough to get the numbers to work.” Families and schools pay membership fees, although there are scholarship funds for children from under-served schools so they can participate. Tew also raises money from foundations and business.
It is an unusual model for a squash club, but it makes sense since it is focused on juniors. There is a study hall and league matches and an elite, invitation-only travel team called the Queen City Spartans (and a pee-wee team called the Queen City Cubs). There is even a Spartan code of conduct that each team member signs. In January 2014 the T Center, along with the Cincinnati Country Club, is hosting the city’s first gold junior tournament.
“I’ve been looking at squash from the lens of a father and what it teaches children,” Tew said. “I was seeing all the valuable lessons I learned as a child, and I realized I had been given an incredible legacy by my father. I wanted to extend that to my children and beyond. The mission is to create an athletic community for children to reinforce the values and character development that parents and schools want to instill: learning to push for excellence and work hard.”
Squash is flourishing in Cincinnati. Nathan Dugan is running the CCC’s program which is robust. The Wyant family is launching Emanuel Squash, an urban squash program in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. At the T, Iago Cornes is now the director of squash. A Spaniard, Cornes formerly coached at Merion and the Missouri Athletic Club. A half dozen schools have started official teams based at the T, and a number of Spartans are now nationally-ranked and have won tournaments around the country. “This is a sort of hybrid model—public, private, urban, junior-focused—that could be replicated elsewhere,” said Tew.
