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Ivy League Hopefuls Take A Swing At Squash

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By ALEX WILLIAMS, The New York Times

Published: December 13, 2007

You've already enrolled your teenagers in Advanced Placement Mandarin, retained a $9,000-a-year college admissions consultant to help refine their applications and sent them off to Kyrgyzstan to dig irrigation ditches for the summer. Still, there's no guarantee that they'll get into an Ivy League university. What are you going to do?

Like a small but growing number of parents, you might hand the kids squash rackets.

In an era of increasingly competitive college admissions - when Princeton, for example, turns down four of five valedictorians who apply - anxious parents are looking for any edge to help their child gain entry to the nation's most selective universities.

Squash, an indoor racket sport long associated with private clubs and old-boy networks, is esoteric, and there are few spots on college rosters. Still, a high percentage of the nation's most prestigious colleges field teams.
Squash pros and coaches say that in the last few years the sport has seen a sharp increase in participation by children and teenagers, some of whose parents seem to have one eye on the ball and the other on college applications.

"Squash is hot right now," said Kenny Scher, executive director of the New York-based Metropolitan Squash Racquets Association, which organizes leagues and tournaments.

U.S. Squash, the sport's governing body in this country, has tracked a 20 percent spike in membership among players younger than 18 during the past two years.

"It's generally known out there that parents are pushing their kids more" because of academic ambitions, Scher said. "They're taking more lessons, they're spending more money." Private lessons run about $80 an hour, plus court time.

In an e-mail message, Gail Ramsay, the women's squash coach at Princeton, confirmed that there are many opportunities for good high school players.

"Not only do the eight Ivy League schools - Columbia will turn varsity in 2011 - have teams, but there are another 21 of the top liberal arts schools that also recruit from this pool of squash players," she wrote. "I actually feel there are not enough players to fill those recruiting spots each year."

"I've noticed in the last year, talking to people in Greenwich, that it seems like there are more squash players than tennis players now," said Lisa Matthews, a mother of three boys in that Connecticut town who have all taken up squash.

Her eldest son, whom she declined to name, leveraged his squash skills to help him earn admission recently to Princeton, which has fueled the ambitions of his younger brothers, she said.

Until recently, squash was almost exclusively a sport of elite schools in the Northeast. Harvard, Princeton and Yale are traditional powerhouses. There are 65 schools with men's intercollegiate varsity or club teams registered with the College Squash Association - 22 emerging in the past few years. And even as squash spreads, it is often embraced by other academically selective universities, including North Carolina, Georgetown, Vanderbilt and Notre Dame. In addition, talented players at the high school level enjoy relatively favorable prospects of playing in college compared to more popular sports.

"Because there are so many college programs growing out there, it's just supply and demand," said Robby Berner, 18, who was recruited to play for Yale after graduating from the Brunswick School in Greenwich this year. "You don't have to be a star coming out of high school."

Squash skills can also help students get into the selective prep schools that are feeder schools for top universities. Kirk Randall, the varsity boys and girls squash coach at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H., said, "We do have contact with our admissions people, and we do try to put in a plug for the kids we'd like to have here as long as they are academically qualified."

Advocates of the sport say squash is still obscure enough that the talent pool is on the shallow side.

"I've had lots of kids who pick up squash in ninth grade and become nationally ranked by the time they apply," said Michele Hernandez, founder of Hernandez College Consulting in Weybridge, Vt. "I can't think of another sport where they can start so late."

Then again, with the number of squash players as young as 8 swelling, parents are concerned they might have already missed the moment.

A New Yorker whose daughter plays squash said that college squash scholarships were still rare, vacancies were few and players from squash hothouses such as the Middle East and South Asia tended to fill many of the openings.

It's to the point, he said, where the last undiscovered college sport seems to be bowling.

In other words, if you're a parent worried about admissions, consider reserving your lane now.

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