Column: Squash stands among the elite sports

The atmosphere in Jadwin Gymnasium on Sunday was also just a whole lot of fun — plain and simple. Sightlines were at a premium, and there is certainly something to be said for making the courts more accessible to larger groups of spectators, but the competition and the sport itself were almost never a letdown. It’s an awesome game to watch, with easily intuited rules. The competitors have no helmets or dugouts to hide behind or in — they are emotionally bare, which makes for some compelling and very human moments. The speed and complexity of the shot-making is impressive on a superficial level even to someone like me, who entered the weekend with very little prior knowledge. All of which is to say, I don’t think the stakes have to be as high as they were on Sunday in order for a crowd to be engrossed by squash and invested in the outcome.

For sports fans at Princeton, there are the obvious teams to follow: football, basketball, hockey, soccer. There are also sports for which the logistical hurdles are too high to make attending and/or enjoying said attendance a realistic goal: the sprawling acreage of golf or cross country, the remoteness of crew, the heat and pace of baseball. But squash strikes me as one of a few sports here that doesn’t get the respect or interest that it deserves, for reasons that have nothing to do with the competitions themselves.

What I’m trying to get at is, if you were to sit down and objectively evaluate every sport at Princeton, I don’t think the hierarchy you would come up with would fit the current model. Princeton squash is not inherently less interesting to watch than Princeton football, and yet there is the sense that attending the latter is a passable social event — when the team is decent — while attending the former is an oddity.

You shouldn’t have to think very long about why this is the case. We care about football and basketball more mostly because other colleges do. Other colleges do because there is immense interest in the professional variations of said sports, and universities directly provide those leagues their talent. By this line of thinking, sports like squash are irrelevant because in America they are irrelevant on a professional level. Showing any devotion to it would be a symbol of just how out of touch Ivy League students are with the things that people actually care about.

This is a familiar refrain. I’ve developed a gag reflex to any medium-sized sequence of words about any kind of colored bubble at our fine university, but it’s almost sort of relevant here. Just how insulated do you have to be, someone might say to you with a patronizing smirk, in order to become invested in a squash team?

Which, I’ll go ahead and say, is bullshit. It’s the same lazy trope that gets thrown at liberal arts students, with the same implied italics: What are you going to do with that? This isn’t the ‘real world,’ that amorphous and threatening construct, and the things we do and enjoy shouldn’t have to be dictated by it. We are at an idyllic, prohibitively expensive university that, among other things, houses us and serves us food and lets some of us play competitive sports. What about that exactly even pretends to reflect the way things actually work? Fencing! Volleyball! Other things that no one outside of a few dedicated niches care about! Squash is awesome, and we’re really, really good at it. Let’s get insular, folks.