Squash Magazine

Overview and Identity

Squash Magazine is the magazine of US Squash, the national governing body for squash in the United States, covering American squash players, tournaments, clubs, schools, colleges, and the history of the game. Based in New York, where US Squash has long had its national presence, the publication serves a sport with deep roots in private clubs and universities and a growing footprint in public and urban programs. Its subject is the American game in its full range, from junior development to professional tour events.

The magazine exists within a long tradition of American squash publishing that includes earlier national titles devoted to the sport. Its role is distinctive because it speaks for a governing body founded in 1904, the first national squash association in the world, while also reporting as a journal of the community. Readers encounter tournament results and rankings alongside historical retrospectives, instructional thinking, and essays about how a once insular sport has changed its courts, its ball, and its idea of who belongs in the game.

Roots in American Squash and US Squash

To understand the magazine, it helps to understand its publisher's history. Squash arrived in the United States in the 1880s, with early courts at St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, and spread through graduates to clubs in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. In 1904, leaders of an inter-club league founded the United States Squash Racquets Association in Philadelphia, standardizing courts, scoring, and play. It was the world's first squash governing body, and it later became known as US Squash.

The association incorporated as a nonprofit in New York in 1957, oversaw the growth of junior and senior national championships, and merged in 1979 with the separate women's association that had regulated the women's game. Under executive directors from Darwin Kingsley, who began in 1975 when membership numbered in the hundreds, through successors who managed the transition to the international softball game and into the modern professional era, the organization grew to tens of thousands of members and hundreds of clubs. Squash Magazine is the storytelling arm of that century-long institution.

Earlier Publishing Tradition and the Modern Magazine

American squash had a national magazine tradition before the current title took its modern form. From 1978 to 1999, Tom and Hazel Jones published Squash News, described as the first national squash magazine, while also promoting major tournaments including North American Opens and United States Opens. Their work demonstrated both the appetite for national squash journalism and the close link in this sport between publishing, promotion, and community leadership. Tom Jones received many of the sport's highest honors for that combined contribution.

The modern Squash Magazine, published under US Squash, continued that function with the resources of the governing body behind it. Its archive reaches back through the 2000s and 2010s in digital form, with recurring features that look back five, ten, and fifteen years into past issues. Those retrospectives show a publication conscious of its own record-keeping role, revisiting junior champions, college stars, and professionals to trace careers over time, such as homegrown players who rose from American junior squash to the world professional rankings.

Editorial Focus and Tournament Coverage

Tournament coverage is the magazine's backbone. It reports national championships across age groups, junior and high school championships, college squash through the College Squash Association's orbit, doubles, masters events, and professional tournaments held in the United States, including iconic events staged in venues such as New York's Grand Central Terminal. International coverage follows American players on the professional world tour and United States teams at world championships, connecting domestic readers to the global game centered historically in England, Egypt, and other squash nations.

Beyond results, features examine the people and institutions of the sport: coaches who built programs, clubs that added courts or converted older ones, referees, promoters, and families with generations of players. The magazine's Hall of Fame coverage is a good example, profiling inductees whose contributions ranged from championship play to publishing and tournament promotion. Such pieces define squash success broadly, honoring builders as well as champions, which reflects how a small sport actually sustains itself through volunteer and institutional labor.

The Hardball to Softball Transition

No theme is more important in modern American squash than the transition the magazine has repeatedly chronicled: the shift in the 1990s from the North American hardball game, played on narrower courts with a faster, harder ball, to the international softball game played on wider courts everywhere else in the world. The formal adoption of softball singles in the mid-1990s unified the United States with global standards, opened American squash to international coaches and professionals, and required the physical conversion of courts across the country.

Squash Magazine has treated that change as both a technical story and a change in mindset. Writers have described how the new game altered tactics, training, and spectating, and how it coincided with a broader opening of the sport. Veterans who mastered hardball, including the great doubles tradition that survived the transition, appear in its pages alongside juniors raised entirely on softball. By revisiting the shift with historical perspective, the magazine helps readers understand why American courts, rankings, and playing styles look the way they do today.

Urban Squash and the Opening of the Game

A second transformation covered extensively is the rise of urban squash. Beginning in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia in the 1990s, urban programs combined squash instruction with academic support for young people from underserved communities, at first often using converted hardball courts. The model spread nationally and changed the demographics and public purpose of a sport long associated with private clubs and preparatory schools. Squash Magazine has presented these programs as central, not peripheral, to the sport's American future.

That coverage aligns with the governing body's stated vision that all people should have the opportunity to enhance their health and well-being through squash. Participation figures cited in the magazine's era illustrate the scale of change, with American participation rising from roughly one hundred thousand players to well over a million by the mid-2010s, according to industry survey figures discussed in its pages. Stories about school programs, public courts, and community centers show how that growth happened facility by facility, and they give urban program alumni a place in the sport's national narrative.

History, Memory, and the Craft of the Game

Historical writing is a hallmark. The origins of squash at Harrow School in England, where the game developed in the nineteenth century, have been researched by squash journalists whose work first appeared in magazine form before becoming books, notably James Zug's history of the game published in 2003 after magazine reporting from Harrow. The magazine's regular look-back features mine its own archive in the same spirit, connecting a junior result from fifteen years ago to a player's later career in college, coaching, or public service.

Instruction and craft receive attention suited to a technically demanding sport. Articles and columns consider shot selection, movement, conditioning, doubles strategy, and the etiquette and refereeing traditions that squash values highly. Equipment and court innovations, from ball standards to glass show courts used in professional events, are covered as they affect play and presentation. For club players, this material provides a vocabulary for improving; for newcomers, it explains customs that can otherwise make an established squash community feel closed.

Digital Presence and Community

Squash Magazine's digital home presents current stories, features from the archive, and US Squash news in a continuous online format, extending the reach of what was once primarily a membership print publication. Online publishing allows timely tournament reporting, photo-rich features, and easy sharing by clubs, schools, and programs that use stories about their players to build local support. The magazine's presence complements the governing body's rankings, membership, and event systems, which are the daily digital tools of competitive players.

The audience is the American squash community itself: junior players and parents, high school and college teams, club competitors, doubles and masters players, coaches, teaching professionals, referees, and alumni who remain attached to programs. Because the community is comparatively small and interconnected, the magazine's recognition carries weight. A junior profile, a club feature, or a Hall of Fame tribute is read by people who know the subjects personally, which reinforces the publication's careful, celebratory tone and its responsibility as a record keeper.

Significance for Squash in the United States

Squash Magazine is significant because it gives a niche, historically private sport a public memory and a shared national conversation. It documents the unification of the American game with the world game, the conversion of courts, the growth of college and junior squash, the achievements of American professionals such as leading women players who reached the top of the world rankings, and the urban movement that redefined the sport's social reach. Without a governing-body magazine performing that work, much of this history would exist only in club lore and scattered results.

As squash enters a new era of visibility, including its inclusion in the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games program, the magazine's archive and ongoing reporting provide context that a sudden spotlight cannot create on its own. It can explain where American squash came from, why its traditions matter, and how widely its community has expanded. For players in New York and across the country, Squash Magazine remains the most complete running account of their sport's American story.