Lucky: Anil Nayar’s Story—A Portrait of a Legendary Squash Champion By Jean Nayar (New York: Five Rivers Press, 2020). By James Zug Lucky is the biography of one of the top amateurs of the twentieth century. Anil Nayar and his wife Jean Nayar have put together a fascinating story of a great champion...
By Chris McClintick This past December in Washington, DC, the global pinnacle of men’s team squash, the World Squash Federation’s Men’s World Team Championship, arrived in the United States for the first time in the event’s fifty-year-history. Squash on Fire, which opened in 2017, hosted the event in the diplomatic center...
Forty years ago, in March 1980, a half dozen enterprising, young women flew to Sweden for the first-ever World Junior Championships: Patrice McConnell Cormwell, Kat Castle Grant, Karen Kelso, Alicia McConnell, Diana Staley and coach Carol Weymuller. The tournament was played in Kungalv, a small village north of Gothenburg....
by James Zug Damien Mudge has an intentional relationship with velocity. For twenty years he played professional squash doubles across North America. The very first time he went on a doubles court, his boss and mentor at the University Club of New York, Gary Waite, wound up and cracked a...
The finals of the 2019 FS Investments U.S. Open came within a half-inch of duplicating the 2017 edition, with the wife and husband team of Nour El Tayeb & Ali Farag again almost pulling off the historic double of a married couple winning the same title on the same...
Muggy Mugaseth might be the answer to the trivia question of who was the first international student-athlete to play intercollegiate squash. The cover of Squash: A History of the Game features a photograph of the 1951 Harvard men’s squash team. Standing next to a six foot five David Watts is...

Gold Record

Team USA’s squash players standing atop of the podium and singing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” with hands over hearts and with gold medals hanging from their necks. At the Pan American Games in Lima, Peru in July, this scene became a regular occurrence for six Americans. They summited the highest podium...
Intercollegiate squash, entering its ninety-eighth season, is looking as vibrant as it ever has. Diversity is the current watchword in the College Squash Association: there are more teams from more regions of the country and more players and coaches from across the country and around the world. Players hail from...
by James Zug Photography by Michael T. Bello/mtbello.com. For college squash, the twenty teens turned out to be the Decade of Way. Mike Way started coaching at Harvard in August 2010. Since then his squads have captured nine national team titles; the next best mark for the decade is six, by...

National Singles on Fire

By James Zug For the 108th time, the best singles players in the country gathered to play each other for the right to claim a national championship. The 2019 National Singles, spread across seventeen divisions, were special not just because it continued the squash world’s oldest annual national championship but...