In a recent Squash Mad article, Mike Dale rightly worried about “the decay of our sport at participation level’, writes Dan Regan.

Even squash writing and reportage are skewed, as is the case for other sports, toward professional and elite levels. Mine is a message to newcomers. What might attract recreational players? Here are some reasons—there are others—to take up the game.  

Present orientation

“Squash is life,” wrote a local teaching pro on his website. No, it isn’t, at least not below elite or professional levels, and the remove from reality is part of its appeal. Players, when they step onto the court, create their own universe, putting their lives temporarily on hold. Closing the door to the court shuts everything else out.

Squash, engrossing and fast-paced, makes a radical demand on its participants to live in the present. You will have no time to think about anything except the task at hand: neither about work to be done nor errands to be run. Every player knows what happens when your mind wanders. Your opponent quickly reaches 11 before you can say “Let Point!” 

Mental health experts and advice columnists exhort us to live in the present. Decent squash demands it.

Its intimacy

Squash is a particularly intimate sport. You are both, after all, in a small, enclosed space “on the same side of the net.” That intimacy demands a calibrated mixture of both conflict as well as cooperation. Without the latter, a flowing game is next to impossible.

The traffic problems around the T become insurmountable and the action no fun at all. Squash demands rivalry, aggression, and fierce competition, but also some degree of agreement, cordiality, and harmony.

You and your opponent—at sub-elite levels often termed, for good reason, a squash “partner”— are together responsible for co-creating a kind of happening or performance.

Squash: A global sport

You will be playing a truly global sport. Squash enthusiasts in my country, the US, are at least vaguely aware that the ball in use today superseded a harder, bouncier one in America. Less remarked upon is how remarkable a change that was. It occurred in the late twentieth century, when globalization was at its zenith.

So often the direction of globalization meant the export of North American cultural items: the McDonaldization of the world. Squash provided an exception to this pattern, a reversal of the usual globalization vector. Americans adopted what the rest of the (squash) world did, instead of the reverse. And what a bounty we reaped in return: a more beautiful and demanding game that paid increased dividends in fitness and fun.

Reward for proficiency

As you get better, your skill at striking the ball will improve, but so will your opponents’ retrieving abilities. The upshot is that rallies will get longer, which provides tremendous motivation to improve. Longer rallies contribute to an enjoyable sense of flow. Only occasionally do points end abruptly by an emphatic serve or return. While the serve and return are important, neither dominates, as they do in several other racket sports. Once the ball is in play, points have a chance to develop through extended rallies.

Mental challenges

Squash is a demanding physical game, but also a mental one. It will force you to navigate seamlessly across several areas of knowledge while unconsciously tackling an array of mental challenges. It is not too much to call squash a truly interdisciplinary activity.

The most basic shots, straight rails and crosscourts, make players quickly size up angles and intuitively perform calculations that are the equal of those on geometry exams. Boasts and shots into the nick demand even more complex reckonings. In the arcs traced by drives or lobs, finding a balance between pace, height, and distance is similarly critical.

These kinds of computations, performed on the fly, are those a physics instructor would recognize. The twin themes of conflict and cooperation are dear to any sociologist’s heart. Naturally, kinesiology comes into play, as squash tests several principles of fitness and movement science. Squash also incorporates elements from the arts—dance, for instance, in the intricate ballet of players around the T.

To this list of answers to “why squash?” we can add gender parity and the way squash, named “the healthiest sport in the world” multiple times by Forbes Magazine, provides an efficient workout. Even more, you get to play on a court that shares dimensions with those used by the pros. There is no need to fantasize about a Field of Dreams.

And these are all aspects of squash available to every player, not just those in the top echelons.

Dan Regan, a sociologist, is retired from teaching and academic administration, but not from the squash court.