Before I moved to Canada, I had never heard about this game, and was surprised that such an entertaining game is not in Olympics. Therefore, I asked my coach about the history of that game and googled some additional info, which I want to share here in my blog.
ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY YEARS OF SQUASH
by Ted Wallbutton
For over 1000 years man has invented and enjoyed a variety of games played by hitting a ball with either a closed fist – as in “fives” or “bunch of fingers” – or with some form of bat or racket. Around the year 1148 the French played “la Paume”, meaning “the palm of the hand”, which developed into Jeu de Paume, Real Tennis, Royal Tennis or, if you play the sport, simply Tennis. At sometime in the early 19th century this obsession with rackets and balls spawned another variety of the sport in the unlikely birthplace of the Fleet Prison in London. The prisoners in “The Fleet”, mainly debtors, took their exercise by hitting a ball against walls, of which there were many, with rackets and so started the game of “Rackets”. Rackets progressed, by some strange route, to Harrow and other select English schools about 1820 and it was from this source that our own sport of Squash, or Squash Rackets, developed.
Squash was invented in Harrow school around 1830, when the pupils discovered that a punctured Rackets ball, which “squashed” on impact with the wall, produced a game with a greater variety of shots and required much more effort on the part of the players, who could not simply wait for the ball to bounce back to them as with Rackets. The variant proved popular and in 1864 the first four Squash courts were constructed at the school and Squash was officially founded as a sport in its own right.
In those early days Squash, as with all other sports, was without any form of international standardisation and it was inevitable that slight variations in the way it was played, and the equipment used, would occur. Luckily only two main streams of activity followed, one in England with its 21 feet wide courts and “soft” ball and the other in North America, with its 18½ feet wide courts and “hard” ball and with both courts having the same length of 32 feet the universality of Squash was not seriously challenged. We will look at these two branches separately and also at the way in which Squash spread to almost every nation in the world.
THE WORLD SCENE
In its early days international Squash was controlled by the Squash Rackets Association of England and the United States Squash Rackets Association, but in 1966 representatives of the sport from Australia, Great Britain, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, USA, Canada and the United Arab Republic met in London and agreed to form the International Squash Rackets Association (ISRF), the first meeting of which was held on 5 January 1967.
The ISRF continued to thrive and was amalgamated with the Women’s International Squash Federation in 1985. In 1992 the name of the Federation was changed to the World Squash Federation (WSF), finally recognising that the sport had been universally referred to simply as “Squash”, rather than “Squash Rackets”, for most of its existence.
Squash is played in some 185 countries, on nearly 50,000 courts, and the WSF now has 150 Squash playing National Associations in membership. It is the sole International Federation for the sport, as recognised by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and maintains responsibility for the Rules of the Game, Court and Equipment Specifications, Refereeing and Coaching. The WSF maintains a World Calendar of events, organises and promotes World Championships for Men, Women, Junior Men, Junior Women and Masters age groups in both singles and doubles Squash; and leads its Member Nations in programmes for the development of the sport.
Squash has been played for over 140 years, grown sensationally in the last forty and is now poised to become one of the largest and best loved of all sports.
http://www.worldsquash.org/ws/?page_id=839
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