Three days a week after a long day at work, Pam Regan, a sales manager for Donnelley Yellow Pages, drives from Huntington Beach to Gardena to play squash at the Squash Club of Los Angeles.
There, she might see Bill Carlin, a real estate agent, who drives from Whittier to enjoy a sport he has played since prep school.
"I've been playing the game for 40 years," Carlin says. "I love the game. It's a great way to stay in shape."
"In squash, you use your body and mind together," Regan says. "You have to be able to outsmart your opponent. I'm proficient at racquet skills, and I used to teach racquetball. You have to be more fit to play squash. Squash is a social sport. . . . There are more men players than women. You make friends because you share a common interest in the game."
Squash, a racquet game played on an indoor court, has until recently been associated with prep schools and Ivy League universities. According to Bob Hanscom, a teaching pro at both the Ketchum Downtown YMCA (a public facility) and the University Club of Los Angeles (a private club), the three top U.S. schools for squash are Harvard, Princeton and Yale.
"Squash has been the most popular game at the Pentagon and on Wall Street. Today, we also have players from all walks of life," he says.
Hanscom says the game began in 18th-Century England, where it was popular at the exclusive private boys' schools, Eton and Harrow. Later, the game was taken up in debtors' prisons, where inmates played it for exercise. The game was introduced into Eastern U.S. prep schools and Ivy League universities in the 1920s. As students graduated, they took the sport with them into the private clubs of New York and Boston. Eventually, the entrepreneurial spirit stimulated the opening of public squash clubs.
"Squash was very popular with British army officers in India, especially near Pakistan," says Jeremy Stone, a Santa Monica CPA who currently serves as president of the Southern California Squash Racquets Assn. "Today, many world champions are Pakistanis."
Stone learned to play squash at Haileybury School in England and later played for Trinity Hall at Cambridge University.
Stone and Hanscom concur that the current growth in squash in Southern California comes from the influx of players from the East Coast and from countries where squash is a popular school sport--Great Britain, Australia, South Africa, India, Pakistan.
