Carpe Frosty

Last month I was involved in two nationals squash tournaments that showed how sustaining the game is.

 

The first was the high school nationals. It had one hundred and forty-one teams (about a thousand players on site) at four sites in central Connecticut. I churned through a tank of gas shuttling from Wesleyan to Choate to Trinity to Yale to Trinity—and that was just in the first thirty hours of the weekend.

I was helping with the St. Andrews School’s boys and girls. I had been an assistant coach at SAS for the winter, coming down once or twice a week to work with the fifty kids that make up Delaware’s only high school squash program. (One day while stretching in the gym, surrounded by state championship banners, I joked that they get the school to put some up for squash—a state title is a state title.) It was wonderful working with such great kids, drilling, hitting and playing knock-knock. However, I am still waiting to go on a Frosty run to the Friendly’s in Middletown (the school’s motto right now seems to be Carpe Frosty, a play on the film that was shot at the school, Dead Poet’s Society).

When I got to the nationals, I discovered that I was not alone. Dozens of people like me who have full-time jobs (or the equivalent in my case) spent their winters helping high school squash teams. I ran into Duncan Pearson (Springside), Carole Grunberg (Potomac), John Musto (Chapin), Rich Sheppard (Springside). St. Andrews faced off against Chapin (an eighth grader for Chapin clawed back from a 0-2 deficit to win her match in five and clinch a 4-3 win over us), and there was Musto and I, coaching against each other, after having worked at a squash camp together twenty years earlier. (To be fair, John has now taken on a full-time job running the squash program at CityView in New York.)

More than one person asked me if I ran into any contemporaries who were there not because they were coaches but because they were parents, and yes, just one (David Ganek) but one was enough to make me feel old.

The other tournament was the century doubles in New York. I played with my father in the 70+ division. Overall, the century had eighty-six teams in five divisions. A plane-load came down from Toronto (both our matches were against Toronto teams), a dozen from Louisville, including a couple who were not playing but just came for the party. (see p. 156 of my history of U.S. squash book for the Louisville’s motto) and even one came from Sweden. It was even more obvious to me that squash is a lifetime sport, as the century necessarily had a lot of older guys, including many in their eighties.

Four guys not there were the four that played in the 80+ division at the hardball nationals in Boston in February: Charlie Baker, Charlie Butt, Henri Salaun and Bill Wilson. (Butt was coming down to the century but got the flu.) That is a murderers row of great players and much fanfare should go to Goose Wilson, the defending champion, who survived a five-gamer against Butt to win the title again.

One thought on “Carpe Frosty”

  1. Both events were tremendous!Let’s hope that the youngsters incorporate squash into their activities of daily living. They will be healthier and happier in their lives if they do.

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