In early February I spent the night at Khaled Sobhy’s house in Sea Cliff, outside New York. For a couple of hours we sat and watched on television the massive demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Sobhy’s hometown. We talked how the upheaval might affect the women’s world juniors, which were scheduled for Cairo in July. Sobhy said that he was going to email U.S. Squash and suggest they offer an alternative here in the States. Perhaps Harvard or Yale could host?
It would be good for our development—we’ve only hosted two world championships before, the 1998 men’s juniors and the 1999 women’s open—and good for Sobhy’s daughter, Amanda, the defending world junior champion, who would much rather play in her home country than in Cairo where her chief rivals live (though she trains every summer in Cairo).
Sobhy fired off some emails and discovered that U.S. Squash was already working on it with the World Squash Federation. At that point, it was wait and see. Well, at the end of July Harvard will be hosting the women’s world juniors.
This will be an enormous boon to the U.S. squash community. Unlike in 1998 or 1999, we’ll have an American who is likely to go far in the tournament if not win it, so the marketing campaign is much easier. In 1998 for instance, only four boys—out of seventeen—managed to win a match (Eric Pearson, Peter Kelly, Rich Repetto and Peter Karlen) and none won more than one. A typical result was Dylan Patterson, a very good American player, and yet he lost to future world champion Nick Matthew 1, 0, 0.
At the women’s world open in 1999 in Seattle, only two Americans made it into the main draw, and both, the Khan sisters Shabana and Latasha, lost in the first round.
No American was seeded in 1998 or 1999; Sobhy will likely be seeded number one.
It is also a mammoth event. The 1998 event at Princeton had a budget of $280,000.
The good news is that Messrs. Patterson, Kelly, Pearson, Repetto and Karlen, plus the Khan sisters, are still playing the game actively, sort of: the men are playing hardball doubles in NYC/Philadelphia.Patterson is defending national doubles champion in partnership with Steve Scharff. It would be interesting to know who the other 13 players were who competed in 1998, and to see if they are still playing the game. Naturally the Khan sisters are still playing singles, and playing well.