by James Zug
Susan Gross was an ordinary squash mother. She had a precocious daughter, Amy, who loved squash but in the mid-1990s it was hard to find clubs where Amy could play. They lived outside Philadelphia and almost all the clubs were private. Amy had started playing at eight or nine years old and loved it. She did well in tournaments. You could see that when Amy went on the court, she got serious, that all her squash friends were important but playing did something for her. She was aching to play.
Susan taught French and Spanish at Harriton High School, one of the Main Line’s leading public schools. In early 1995 she started exploring a radical idea: starting a public-school squash team. Of course, Harriton itself didn’t have courts: when she approached the athletic director at Harriton about starting a team, he asked, “what is squash?” But he also said he’d be happy if she started a team. She called every private club in the area. They all said no. They said they couldn’t have non-members on the court.
The last club she called was Cynwyd Club. The pro was Andrew Slater. He had just arrived at Cynwyd, and new and optimistic, he agreed to help take on this outlandish idea. It took time. In September 1997, Susan hosted an open recruitment at Harriton; ten kids showed up. She then went to Lower Merion High School, another public school four miles away and ten more showed up. Cynwyd agreed to let the kids play from 3:00pm to 4:30pm. Only three of the original cohort had ever played squash before. The team got going. Slater coached for free. Susan Gross persuaded private schools to schedule matches with this new team. Harriton-Lower Merion had no uniforms. Parents car-pooled the kids to matches. They were a co-ed team for the first two years. It was hand-to-mouth. But it survived and thrived.
Harriton-Lower Merion was the first public school squash team in the country. Today, exactly thirty years after Susan Gross first decided to start a team, she has spawned a movement. HLM is a thriving program, as well as other public-school teams in Philadelphia and Baltimore. There is Fairwest, a robust league in the New York and Connecticut counties of Westchester and Fairfield, founded in 2008. Last season Fairwest featured more than 500 kids playing on fifty varsity, junior varsity or club squash teams. Fairwest is the largest public school high school squash league in the country. In 2022 the Arlen Specter US Squash Center launched a Philadelphia public school league featuring a dozen nearby schools. The Specter annually hosts the National High Schools each February. Of the 200 varsity squads competing in thirteen divisions at the tournament, fifty are public school teams.
All of this because Cynwyd said yes.
Cynwyd said yes because innovation was baked into its DNA. There are vigorous private squash clubs everywhere in the Philadelphia suburbs, most of which have been central to the development of squash dating back to the arrival of the game in the city in 1900. Anchored by the founding squash mecca, the Racquet Club of Philadelphia in the heart of the city, illustrious private clubs, all with hardball doubles courts, fan out in a wave across the suburbs—Germantown, Gwynned, Merion Cricket, Philadelphia Country, Philadelphia Cricket, Vicmead Hunt, Wilmington Country
The smallest, both in terms of membership and in acreage, is Cynwyd Club. It was founded in 1913. The Tudor-style clubhouse is tucked into a three-acre property in an old residential neighborhood in Bala Cynwyd. For its first couple of years, the club, designed by the leading Philadelphia architect Louis Carter Baker, Jr., was officially a community center, until members bought the club. The club put up two squash singles courts that were a bit too narrow. At the start Cynwyd was much more focused on tennis, with red clay courts and serious talent—its interclub team in the early 1920s included Wallace Johnson and Bill Tilden.
In 1935, now with four squash singles courts, the club added a doubles court. Norm Bramall, first the chair of Cynwyd’s tennis committee (and also the men’s tennis coach at Haverford College) became the club’s head squash pro in 1942. He stayed until 1984. Mild-mannered and patient, always dressed in cream-colored flannel pants, Bramall became a legendary figure in American squash. His pro shop was in the boiler room at Cynwyd, and he strung all his racquets with a vise and awl, with no stringing machines. Some of Bramall’s advice holds true today: Always be cognizant of the T; don’t panic and overrun balls—they will come back to you; and, most famously, make the walls your friend.
In 2016 Bramall was enshrined in the U.S. Squash Hall of Fame. One reason was that he coached seven different women—Jane Austin Stauffer, Lois Dilks, Margaret Varner Bloss, Ann Wetzel, Joyce Davenport, Carol Thesieres and Barbara Maltby—to a National Singles title. This was an unprecedented achievement in long history of U.S. squash, especially considering most of them had never hit a ball before he introduced the game to them. (All but Dilks are in the Hall of Fame as well.) Cynwyd, unusually in that era, was welcoming to women. The club wasn’t particularly radical in nature—according to a 2021 history of the club written by Sandy Harrison, it wasn’t until 1939 that the club permitted the playing of cards, pool or billiards on Sundays; juniors were not allowed to play tennis on Sundays for decades; and it was only in 1951 that Cynwyd voted to permit the sale of liquor at the club. But it supported women’s squash. Bramall mentored hundreds of other women, including Hall of Famers Cecile Bowes, Betty Meade and Gail Ramsay as well as Connie Pierce and Molly Pierce. The club had the region’s first woman country club president, Paula Gasparon. In the early 1980s Bramall entered an all-women’s team into the Philadelphia SRA’s men’s B league; the team won the league title. A central part of the club’s spirit was Kathie Fox Pierce. Kathie was a member since 1975 and general manager from 1985 to 1998. She was a club tennis champion, board member and avid squash player and bowler. Cynwyd was where she met her future husband, Michael. Kathie continued producing the club’s newsletter until 2017, long after she and Michael had moved to Vero Beach Florida.
For much of the twentieth century, Philadelphia had a notoriously inward-looking squash scene. Its members didn’t travel to other cities as much—the softly centrifugal pull of these magnificent clubs and great players seemingly preventing them from reaching escape velocity—and unlike most other major squash cities hosting top-line pro or even amateur invitational tournaments was sometimes not part of the Philadelphia clubs’ typical winter schedule.
Cynwyd, on the other hand, was unusually public facing. Maurice Heckscher ran the season-ending men’s pro doubles event, the Elite. Founded in 1982, the Elite was a major tournament with high prize money and packed galleries. For many years it was the only pro doubles tournament in Philadelphia. On the singles court, Cynwyd was at the forefront of the epochal, controversial and inevitable switch from hardball to softball. In 1904 squash in North America standardized an eighteen-and-a-half-foot wide court with hard, fast ball, while the rest of world in the 1920s and 1930s standardized a twenty-one foot court with a slower, softer ball. For more than a half century, the two versions were like grass tennis and red clay tennis—two separate ways to play the game. The first regulation softball courts in the U.S. were bult in September 1976 at Uptown Racquet Club in New York. But a decade later, only a dozen more had appeared, mostly in non-traditional squash districts out west. Most importantly, there was not a single softball courts in Philadelphia, the heart and home of the game. As a part of Cynwyd’s seventy-fifth anniversary, it tore down the two 1913 squash courts and opened in March 1989 a $400,000 squash facility ($1.1 million today) with a new squash doubles court and, most vitally, a softball singles court.
Three months later, in Cynwyd style, it hosted $5,000 men’s pro softball singles tournament, the first of its kind in the area. The event grew each year. “We had a great time working hard to run the event,” said tournament director John Schellenberg. “A big highlight early on was a match that Tom Page played on opening night before a standing-room only crowd.”
In October 1993 the club hosted the Rolex U.S. Open. It was a historic moment: for the first time since the national open championship was founded in 1954, it featured a women’s draw and it had come to Philadelphia. Total prize money was $36,000 ($79,000 in 2024 money): $26,000 for the men; $10,000 for the women. After that year, the U.S. Open left, not to return to the city until 2011 at Drexel.
After 1993, the club continued to host a pro singles tournament, but it shared it with other local clubs that now, with Cynwyd leading the way, had built softball courts. Most of those courts, like Cynwyd’s, were built by Dan Keating, a Cynwyd member, squash enthusiast and owner of a major Philadelphia construction firm (think Philadelphia Convention Center). Keating built more than fifty squash courts over the next decades, and then during the pandemic in a feat of logistical brilliance, he led the construction project team at the Arlen Specter US Squash Center with its twenty courts. At the 2021 U.S. Open, US Squash honored Keating with the W. Stewart Brauns Award, one of the organizations highest awards. “
Cynwyd takes its role in the transition seriously. At the front entrance, a green sign, edged in yellow, refers to the switch to softball: “Cynwyd Club: Private Club Members Only—A Swimming, Tennis & International Squash Club.”
A common squash trivia question: what is the greatest club in the country? It is impossible to measure what makes a club great, but one metric of many might be how many inductees into the U.S. Squash Hall of Fame does the club have.
The numbers are surprising. The Hall of Fame is a comprehensive cohort of the entire history of the game, singles and doubles, hardball and softball, teaching pros and college coaches. After a quarter of a century on enshrinements, there have seventy-one inductees, ranging from people born in the 1880s and in the 1980s. Wilmington Country Club has two people from their club in the Hall of Fame; University Club of Boston has three; Heights Casino in Brooklyn as four. Merion Cricket Club has fourteen. Cynwyd Club has fifteen: Cecile Bowes, Norm Bramall, Bob Callahan, Joyce Davenport, Maurice Heckscher, Darwin Kingsley, Barbara Maltby, Betty Meade, Michael Pierce, Tom Poor, Gail Ramsay, Jane Stauffer, Carol Thesieres, Margaret Varner, and Ann Wetzel.
Despite its standing as one of a pioneering squash club, Cynwyd struggled at times. Tennis, with eleven courts (converted from red clay to Hard Tru in 1988) was popular in the summer and squash in the winter. Yet, the three-acre campus was not big enough to expand to meet the expectations of potential members. After the turn of the twenty-first century, the club went through a series of crises. In 2006 to cover deferred maintenance, it assessed the membership which resulted in a significant exodus. A surprise bequest from a longtime Cynwyd member helped tied the club over through the 2008 financial crisis, and over the years HLM families joined the club. The generous Pierce family also helped sustain the club.
In 2009 Cynwyd turned the old four-lane bowling alley in the basement into a fitness center and in 2012 the club added two more squash singles courts and modernized much of the campus. At the club’s centennial in June 2013, everything seemed shipshape and exciting—Bob Callahan, who grew up near the club, came back to movingly speak about Princeton’s recent national team championship that ended Trinity’s record streak.
But three years later the club was struggling again as membership lagged down to sixteen families and a few dozen individuals. The club was in danger of closing. In 2018 under the leadership of general manager and former Cynwyd head professional Shane Coleman, the club took out three tennis courts and put in a twenty-five-yard-long saltwater swimming pool. “We were at a crossroads and had nothing left to lose,” Coleman said. “We were worried about changing the heritage of the club, the fabric, but at the same time we had to attract new families.” Overcoming resistance from neighbors and from the township, the club was able to open the pool. It stunningly transformed the club. Today the membership includes 330 families, seventy individuals and a wait list. “Even if we have this great squash history, we are still a small club, almost boutique,” said Coleman. “We are approachable and accessible, and the pool is a part of a vision that the club is an extension of your backyard.”
Today the club continues to punch above its weight. It fills the Philadelphia single and doubles leagues. The HLM legacy: there are two high schools, three middle schools and six elementary school teams headquartered at Cynwyd. In the spring of 2024, the club hosted the National Doubles—it was the largest in the nearly hundred years of the event, with 157 teams. In the fall of 2024, it hosted another pro doubles event, just like the old days of the Elite. The Philadelphia Open was women-only, this time, with a $15,000 prize fund and again jammed galleries. Gina Stoker, the head squash pro at Cynwyd, with her partner Lauren West, almost snuck through with a victory but lost in five to Kayley Leonard & Maria Elena Ubina.
“There is just no other club like it in the country,” said Molly Pierce afterwards. “And we love it.”