With all the hubbub surrounding Sherwood Athletic Center’s new, state-of-the-art climbing wall, improved training room facilities and team locker room space for varsity programs, one of the most important improvements seems to have been pushed to the way-side: resurfaced squash courts!

I understand that many of you probably do not play, or perhaps have not even heard of, the game called squash: that is, unless you went to some super exclusive East Coast private school. The purpose of this column, then, is to enlighten you with the merits of the sport and maybe score some fellow squash-playing partners.

The first thing you must know is that squash is not like racquetball. Racquetball, while fun, is a bastardization of the sport: straight up. It was invented so that people could play so-called squash on a regulation handball court, which were popular across the nation in the 1940s and 1950s.

If you were to compare the two to sandwiches, something to which I’m fond of comparing things, racquetball would be your Philly cheese steak: blue-collar, greasy, consumed around the nation; squash would be your Italian BLT: approachable, clean-cut, but with a certain chic to it as well.

It takes a person of discerning taste to pick the Italian BLT over the Philly. It takes a person of discerning taste to pick squash over racquetball. Racquetball is good; squash is great.

Squash is played with a rubber ball about half the size of and much less bouncy than a traditional racquetball. Because a squash ball doesn’t bounce nearly as high as a racquetball, squash is a more tactical, methodical game.

Racquetball exchanges frequently devolve into a home-run derby of sorts, with each player trying to whack the ball harder than the other, hoping to catch a corner of the wall, send the ball flying off at a weird angle and catch his or her opponent off-balance.

There is some strategy in racquetball, to be sure, but even then, the winner is most often the person who can hit the main wall nearest the floor most consistently.

A low shot dies when it hits the wall, rebounding only a fraction as much as a ball hit any higher, because the friction of the floor slows the ball’s velocity almost immediately after it rebounds off the wall.

On a squash court, wailing away at the ball won’t get you very far. Playing the walls, varying your shots and lobbing balls over your opponent’s head all become extremely important.

This is made all the tougher in squash because the court is lined off; you can’t hit the ball off the ceiling like in racquetball or catch the ball any higher off the back wall than at a certain point.

Saying that squash is a more calculating game is not to say that it is a slow game, by any means. The tight confines of a squash court, which is eight feet shorter than a racquetball court, mean that the game frequently gets fast and frenetic.

Despite all of these advantages, squash doesn’t seem to be played at all on the Whitman campus. I have gone down to the courts quite a few times and found a few racquetballers playing on the adjacent courts, but no squash players.

Part of the reason for this, I’m sure, is that Whitman loans out equipment for racquetball rather than squash. Racquetball, but not squash, is taught as a 1-credit SSRA course.

Why is this? We have squash courts: it doesn’t make sense to have them if we don’t use them. As they are, they’re just a waste of space.

If anybody wants to play some squash, e-mail me at [email protected]. Oh, and I play racquetball too.