Quoting from an article about squash on the Active Newcastle web site: “Most medical professionals discourage anyone over the age of 50 from taking up squash and if in doubt you should seek advice from your GP”. This is also good advice if you are thinking of taking up racketball. It may be easier to learn and to play rallies but it is can also become very demanding physically once you get half decent at it. In fact most players would get significantly longer rallies than they would get playing squash. However, given that it is the better game for a significant proportion of an apparently ageing population and the government is keen to get people to be more active throughout their lives and into later life, it is surprising and perhaps ill advised for English Squash to drop racketball. If you look at the English Squash website there is now no reference to racketball in their main menu and if you can find the racketball section on the news page the most recent racketball new is from July 2015. We are now over half way through the 2015/16 racketball season and nothing has been reported in the ES news.

I’ve had some feedback on the blog – its structure and content. Generally it’s been good, navigations is fairly straightforward and the content is relevant. I’ve made a start on the getting started section and added the beginnings of a coaches tips section. The main criticism so far is that the descriptions of drills and games seem to be accurate but the level of detail is hard to follow. Diagrams of some sort would be useful and I am hoping to add these before too long. What would be better of course are video demonstrations and I’m investigating if this would be possible. In the meantime I though I would construct for each drill and game a more condensed ‘crib card’ that simply states the rules and sequence of play.

In this 33 minute video published on the 19th November this year, the England Squash CEO Keir Worth and the Director Participation, Mark Williams, explain the thinking behind the re-branding of England Squash & Racketball as England Squash. One issue the rebranding is hoping to address is the decline in popularity of squash but this ignores the fact that racketball is showing growth. If the 2 figures have been aggregated and overall still shows decline then squash is in a worse position than they think. And dropping the branch of the sport that is growing seems daft.  It seems clear that they aren’t particularly interested in racketball. They have based the decision on a consultation with squash players. There is no mention of consulting racketball players. They see the separate squash and racketball as divisive and in any case, according to them, no one knows what racketball is! So they want us all to be one squash community. Racketball will continue but renamed and as a form of squash. But surely this is how we see racketball already?

One week later ES published another video on how the recent rebrand will help to inspire new players and reinvigorate current participants. According to this ‘racketball’ as a name will cease to exist and will become part of the squash community. It is now, apparently, seen as a separate and divisive sport. Racketball will continue but it will be renamed. It will be interesting to see what they come up with. At the time in the 1990s when the then Squash Rackets Association took over the younger British Racketball Association there was some discussion about renaming racketball. The main contenders seemed to be ‘big ball squash’ and ‘short squash’. Perhaps tongue in cheek another suggestion was ‘squabble’!

Any thoughts on this?