Looking shell shocked after getting to the final and losing in a club handicap event

This site has been created as a repository for notes and documents about racketball and items and issues of potential interest to racketball players. It is aimed at all racketball players from purely social players to the more focused competitive players who want to take the game as far as they can.

After a break from any physical activity of 25 years (from mid teens to 40 I was actively engaged in cycle racing and squash) at the age of 66 I was just about 18 stone and my prospects for a long active retirement were not looking good. I got back on my bike and decided to take up squash again. It was then I discovered a U3A (University of the Third Age) racketball group that played at a nearby squash club at Heaton, Bradford. I’d seen racketball demonstrated at my old club at Armley in the late 70s and hadn’t taken much notice. It looked like a lot of fun but I was a Leeds Metro League player in those days and a passionate squash player. I decided to join the Bradford U3A racketball group and use racketball to ease my way back into squash. However, I soon decided after giving squash a go a little later that given my more advanced years and a dodgy knee racketball was now the game for me. In the following couple of years I became the U3A National Racketball Advisor and am now just as passionate about racketball as I was about squash. Through my own experience and that of playing with U3A members, nearly all in their 60s and 70s, I am sure in this day when we are trying to encourage everyone from children to pensioners to be more active, racketball is the better proposition. What is so great about it for me is that it is extremely sociable and very well suited to mixed gender and ability groups but I am also able to play in club and regional competitions to a reasonable standard in a way that would be very difficult if not impossible with squash. As well as the U3A group sessions I play in the Heaton club’s  racketball championships and handicap events as well as their box leagues and summer league, I’ve played in North East Counties and Yorkshire closed championships (in the D and over 65 categories) as well as a number of tournaments put on specifically for U3A players. For more details on what exactly racketball is and how it differs from squash visit the What is Racketball page.

There will be information on this site about what racketball is, what the benefits of playing are, how to get going and how to improve. There will be a section on practice drills for one or more players and on multi-player variants of the game. If you have any ideas on how this site could be developed or improved, please leave a comment below this page.

Thank you

Terry Wassall