By James Zug
Marketing a tournament is easy these days: set up a website, send out some tweets, update Facebook and bam! The deal is done.
Not so fast. The North American Open has figured out that the best way to sell itself is with something old-school, something hardcopy. A commemorative...
By James Zug
Ninety players from around the U.S. and Canada took part in the 27th annual National Junior Doubles in April 2013 in girl’s, boy’s and mixed age divisions. First run by Wilmington Country Club’s pro John Righter starting in 1986, the NJD has been the pet product of...
By James Zug
It was never supposed to work out like this. In the summer of 1981, Princeton’s athletic director asked Bob Callahan, newly-married IBM salesman, to be on a search committee to find a new coach for the Princeton University men’s squash team. He was a recent alum, former...
by James Zug
Parity is the watchword at the Delaware Investments United States Open. Two years ago, the national championship became the first major in the squash world to have equal prize money for men and women.
Ironically, one of the complaints during the move to parity in 2013, among some...
By James Zug
Last issue we reviewed a single book, 555, about Jahangir Khan; this issue we take on seven books ranging from novels to anthologies to coaching manuals.
The Science of Sport: Squash
By Stafford Murray, with Mike Hughes, Nic James and Goran Vuckovic
Ramsbury, England: Crowood Press, 2016
In the late 1990s...
by James Zug
I Wow Times Infinity
It was packed. At the 2016 Delaware Investments United States Open, there were no gimmicks, no free pizza for Drexel students, no bouncy castle radar zones. It was the sporting spectacle itself. Fans came in droves.
The early rounds used to be a bit sparse,...
By James Zug
555: The Untold Story Behind Squash’s Invincible Champion and Sport’s Greatest Unbeaten Run
by Rod Gilmour and Alan Thatcher
Worthing, England: Pitch Publishing, 2016
It is hard to recall now, a quarter of a century later, just what a big deal Jahangir Khan was.
He was consistently dominant like...
By James Zug
A Different Kind of Daughter: The Girl Who Hid from the Taliban in Plain Sight
By Maria Toorpakai with Katharine Holstein
(Twelve, 2016)
Within the squash world, it was well-known that Maria Toorpakai had a special story.
She had been a promising junior, the first woman to come out of the...
By James Zug
In February, the U.S. National Hardball Singles Championships had a successful farewell as a national championship at Merion Cricket Club. Eighty-one players from around the continent came to Philadelphia to play with the Slazenger fuchsia ball in the eighteen-and-a-half-foot-wide court.
The draws contained some classic hardball names—Davenport, Edwards,...
By James Zug
Camera crews often come to film at urban squash programs. Usually they are making a short segment for local television. It is pretty common. George Polsky, the founder and executive director of StreetSquash, counted twenty different crews that visited his program.
The twenty-first has stayed. Archimedia Films is...