How Philly Became the Capital of American Squash

Quinetta and Tempest Bowden playing at the Arlen Specter US Squash Center / Photograph by Steve Boyle

Even though she was only in seventh grade, Tempest Bowden clearly remembers the first time she was introduced to squash. A delegation from Philadelphia’s SquashSmarts — a nonprofit mentoring program tasked with introducing Philly public school kids to the sport — filed into the gymnasium at Morton McMichael School in Mantua.

These people are taking up my basketball time, she thought.

Drills commenced. Bowden, a wiry-fiery girl set on becoming basketball’s next Dawn Staley, was hitting the ball against a wall when she caught the eye of Julie Williams, then the group’s executive director. “May I call you Tempestuous?” Bowden recalls her asking. “I said, ‘Sure.’ To this day, she calls me that. I thought, Wow. She must think I’m a natural.”

Before leaving that fall day in 2002, the SquashSmarts team, which also included philanthropist Chase Lenfest, announced open tryouts that Saturday. “I didn’t go, but [her younger sister] Quinetta did,” Bowden recounts. “When Ms. Williams dropped her off at my house, she came to the door and told my father, ‘We want Tempest to try.’ My dad told me I was going. Ever since, I’ve been hooked on squash.”

By year three, she was winning national tournaments. By the time she aged out of junior play, she was the first African American ranked in the top 32 in the nation. Typically, she was the only city kid at that level; the rest were from the ’burbs.

“Sometimes, I felt alone,” admits Bowden, who took sponsorship-paid lessons at the Cynwyd Club with Shane Coleman, the squash pro turned general manager. She’ll never forget a sign outside the tennis courts her first day. It read, “Whites Only.” “I told him, ‘You’re going to have to explain this to me,’” she recalls. “Shane said it meant (and did) that only white clothing could be worn.”

Today, Bowden is SquashSmarts’ director of squash and fitness for the middle school program at the Arlen Specter U.S. Squash Center on Drexel’s campus in University City. Quinetta is senior program director. They’ve climbed to near the top of the local squash ecosystem and played an integral role in a sport whose trajectory is in transition and playing out on a world stage here in Philly.

Since the Specter Center opened in 2021 in a massively renovated armory, it’s rooted Philadelphia as the sport’s magnetic American epicenter in leadership and impact. On average, the city hosts 18 squash tournaments a year. Philly is once again the headquarters for the sport’s national governing body, US Squash, which moved back from New York after decades away. It’s Team USA’s training center ahead of squash’s first Olympic Games, in Los Angeles in 2028.

Philly’s Olivia Weaver is ranked No. 1 in the U.S. and No. 4 in the Professional Squash Association world rankings. Timmy Brownell (No. 29 in the world) and Marina Stefanoni (No. 32) both call Philly home. Another Philadelphian, Olivia Blatchford Clyne (once No. 11, and one of the most decorated women’s players in U.S. history), retired in 2024.

The $56 million Specter Center has an unprecedented 20 world-class courts (18 singles, two of which are all-glass TV broadcast courts, plus two doubles courts). There are seven more at the Kline & Specter Squash Center at Drexel’s Daskalakis Athletic Center. Not to be outdone, the University of Pennsylvania renovated its $19 million Penn Squash Center in 2019 with 12 courts. That’s 37 squash singles courts in a three-block radius. A 2022 City Council resolution renamed North 33rd Street between Arch and Chestnut streets “Squash Way.” There are also eight courts at the Lenfest Center on North 10th Street in Hunting Park in North Philly, which would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago.

It’s an ivy-covered-wall sport no longer. For too long, that was the message. Now, it’s a pathway and a passport.” — Stephen Gregg, executive director of SquashSmarts

But the Specter Center “put the world on notice,” says Gilly Lane, the men’s coach at Penn, the two-time defending­ College Squash Association national champions. (Squash isn’t an NCAA sport yet; more on that later.) A 2018 US Squash study predicted that Specter would have an estimated $23 million annual impact in Philly, but a homecoming stirred long before that. In 2010, John Fry, an avid player at Merion Cricket Club, became Drexel’s president. Later that year, he joined the US Squash board, a move that clinched the university as host of the U.S. Open. By 2013, Fry, as chair, proposed building a squash complex the world would envy. “That stuck with us,” says US Squash president and CEO Kevin Klipstein. “John’s vision became reality.”

The lead gift total — from Shanin and Tracey Specter, who honored Shanin’s late father, Arlen, the veteran U.S. senator who never traveled without his squash racket — isn’t public. Some $41 million from a few dozen private donors — 60 percent of whom were Philadelphians — was spent on the armory’s interior transformation. The commonwealth and Drexel spent $15 million on exterior renovations.

“Philadelphia was fertile ground, and John couldn’t have picked a better location on the entire globe,” says Ned Edwards, a US Squash Hall of Famer and executive director of the US Squash Foundation, who oversaw the project. Now, additionally, as chief of sport development at US Squash, he’s focused on the Olympic berth and building a deeper relationship with those like Comcast NBCUniversal’s Brian Roberts and with Comcast Business, the title sponsor of the U.S. Open, “to see what squash can become.”

Long confined to private clubs, Ivy League institutions, and prep schools, squash’s private-to-public transformation is tangibly connecting urban and suburban interests. The Philadelphia Public League, for one, now has three squash seasons in the books. It’s a prime example of Klipstein’s vision for increasing accessibility and visibility. “It’s an ivy-covered-wall sport no longer,” says Stephen Gregg, executive director of SquashSmarts, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in April. “For too long, that was the message. Now, it’s a pathway and a passport.”

Popularized in 18th-century English prisons as a wall-and-ball game called “rackets” (played with a cloth-rag ball), then adopted in the country’s boarding schools after the 19th-century vulcanization of rubber (using a ball that “squashed,” though the origins of the name are up for debate), a variation of squash arrived in 1900 at the Racquet Club of Philadelphia; soon, the local country clubs built courts. The first national championships were in 1907.

“Philadelphia’s been the heart of the game and arguably never relinquished that,” says Main Line native and journalist James Zug, a squash historian and author of Squash: A History of the Game.

Philadelphia dominated the squash world for decades. Without a doubt, that was driven (hoarded maybe) by the Main Line country clubs. The oldest high school squash rivalry, the Haverford School versus Episcopal Academy match, dates to 1912. In 1958, EA and Haverford College alum G. Diehl Mateer Jr., of the Merion Cricket Club, appeared on a Sports Illustrated cover.

By the 1970s, though, we’d slowly let the sport’s leadership and direction escape to New York, where it remained during its ups (in the ’70s and ’80s) and downs (from the ’90s to the first half of the 2010s). In New York, the governing body was banking “on a larger community, with [what was then] four times the number of donors who donated on average four times as much,” Klipstein says. The larger corporate base didn’t hurt either. The Specter Center shifted that strategy. Since it was built, squash has reemerged “in ways, frankly, that none of us projected accurately,” Edwards says.

Squash participation has tripled in the past 20 years, according to Klipstein, whose staff has grown from just three in 2007 to 26 full-time employees. Two decades ago, a brand study revealed that just one in 100 Americans knew of the sport. “I saw that as an opportunity,” he says.

The cost of building courts has been the most enduring roadblock to equity and access in the sport. US Squash’s latest innovation, indoor and outdoor pop-up modulars, helps address that. It exhibited the concept­ in March at RacquetX, an international racket-sports conference, and then in May, an initiative called Project Beacon opened an outdoor public court in Chicago’s Union Park. The organization is actively engaged in sales (there’s a catchy jingle — “up in a day for less than 50K”), and Klipstein promises, “We’re on a trajectory.”

The growth of the sport has been spurred by the North American hardball game slowly giving way to the international softball game. “Hardball” is a faster, more aggressive, quick shot-making game played with a harder, bouncier ball on a smaller court. “Softball” uses a softer ball and a wider court, resulting in a slower, more strategic style of endurance play. Introduced to North America in the ’70s, this gentler game was by far the most common version by the ’90s.

Squash left some tradition behind and became “a game for the young — and what this sport is for kids is spectacular,” says Edwards, who as a player at Penn was a four-time All-American and the 1979 U.S. College Squash Association individual champion. He went on to attain the No. 2 world ranking five times in singles and a No. 1 ranking in doubles.

Growth also resulted because the private sector shared its sport. “It was a clubby thing,” admits Andy Nehrbas, a past president at Merion turned SquashSmarts founder and board president. “SquashSmarts took it to the other extreme. Now, everyone’s pulling on the same oars.”

In Philly, that transition has taken a village.

Aaron Greene’s sons swam for legendary Hall of Fame coach Jim Ellis, who founded the first Black swim team in the country in 1971. They played Mount Airy baseball. But when his oldest, Aiden, now 22, transferred to Carver Engineering and Science Middle School in eighth grade, there were just two sports. Then Aiden heard about “this squash club,” and asked if he could try it. Immediately, his father wondered, “How much money do we have to raise?” But more than that — “squash?” he says quizzically, looking back.

For their family in Wissahickon, there were two rules for sports: If you start a season you finish it, and school comes first. “Aiden told me, ‘Dad, it doesn’t cost anything.’ ‘Yeah, right,’ I said. I started doing the calculations for a racket, shoes, goggles … and he said, ‘Dad, they provide all that — and they help with schoolwork. They tutor.’ I thought, ‘This kid really doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’”

But Aiden was right. All SquashSmarts costs is commitment. Greene’s younger son, Zachery, now 20, followed his brother, and by senior year had won back-to-back individual Public League titles. He’s studying civil engineering at Penn State. Aiden’s a nursing major at Drexel. SquashSmarts (where Greene has since joined the board) helped both get into those schools.

Likewise, after Temwa Wright’s youngest, Sam, came home with a SquashSmarts flier in his fifth-grade backpack, she didn’t hesitate to enroll him — especially because the sport lacked diversity. “I wanted my son to participate even more,” says Wright (now also a member of the SquashSmarts board), to skirt what she calls “self-selected homogenous circles.” “As much as we say we’d like to diversify, it’s not that easy,” she says.

Incorporated in 2000, SquashSmarts followed pioneering urban squash-education programs SquashBusters in Boston and StreetSquash in New York. Now there are 21 similar organizations in the Squash and Education Alliance (and six more internationally). Honored in November on a Good Morning America segment with Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, SquashSmarts began at the Racquet Club of Philadelphia, then moved to the old hardball courts in the windowless basement of the Daskalakis Athletic Center at Drexel. Tutoring was on the gallery floor above.

The program, which operates year-round with a $2.5 million annual budget, serves 160 student-athletes three days a week at the Specter and Lenfest sites. Services begin in fifth grade and last through high school graduation and into college, if needed. Kids are transported from five strategically selected low-income partner schools.

The Specter Center caters to kids too. It annually hosts the world’s two largest squash tournaments: the U.S. Junior Open, which attracts 1,000 kids from 42 countries, and the U.S. High School Team Squash Championships, which brings in 1,700 players from 22 states. It hosts 444 kids for SEA Team Nationals.

Credit a strong-willed mother, Haverford’s Melinda Justi, for kick-starting the national high school tournament in 2004. She wanted her son Parker, who played at the Haverford School, to compete nationally against different teams, which were becoming increasingly public. “It’s one of the most important things to happen this century in squash,” says Klipstein, due to the unity it’s created and the sheer number of attendees it attracts. Now, about a quarter of the approximately 200 scholastic teams are from public schools. (Credit a Wynnewood mom, Susan Gross, for that. In 1997, she founded the nation’s first public school squash team, the combined Harriton-Lower Merion High team, as an outlet for her daughter Amy, who became a four-time All-American and captain at Yale.)

Sam Wright, a rising junior at Central High, hopes his school will join the five others on the Public League schedule, but it’s still too soon to join Masterman School, the Philadelphia High School for Girls, Esperanza Academy, George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science, and Parkway West High School. All new district sports are clubs for three years, then can be elevated to varsity status, but James Lynch, the district’s executive director of athletics, says squash will remain a club sport in the district until there’s more student engagement and less parental discomfort with after-school transportation to Lenfest or Specter.

The district is also trying to partner with US Squash to pilot squash in the middle school physical education curriculum, according to Timothy E. Morrison, a coordinator in athletic administration and vice president of youth sport development for the Public League. He also says the district has begun using metrics to track the academic performance of student-athletes versus students who do not participate in sports to justify more funding for athletics across the spectrum.

Penn coach and alum Gilly Lane, whose Quakers have won three of the last four Ivy League squash titles, loves the city’s expanding squash ecosystem. And the success of collegiate squash in that explosion is pivotal. “What drives junior participation is the chance to play in college,” he says. There are 31 women’s and 34 men’s varsity collegiate squash teams (Drexel and Haverford included). Forty varsity teams per gender would strengthen a 2030 application for NCAA status, according to College Squash Association commissioner Harry Smith, who in partnership with SquashSmarts has been talking with five city schools — Community College of Philadelphia, Eastern’s Esperanza College, La Salle, Temple (John Fry’s new haunt), and Thomas Jefferson — about starting on a club basis to join the country’s 56 existing club programs.

This expansion is part of the transition that’s afoot. Until then, the most successful American players (like Olivia Weaver) and coaches (like Lane) are still either country-club types reared in the sport or international players who have remained here after their days filling collegiate rosters. In another 20 years, the efforts of SquashSmarts and US Squash will (hopefully) see a more diverse, homegrown talent pool fill those ranks.

Olivia Weaver, a reigning beneficiary of the old-school model, wants to fix a geographic discrepancy once I point out that she’s listed nearly everywhere — even by US Squash — as a New Yorker. “No one’s more upset about that than my father, who has ranted, ‘You were born and raised in Philadelphia!’” she says.

(Shortly thereafter, Edwards confirms her request to change her rightful residence to Philadelphia. “I hadn’t been aware,” he admits sheepishly, “but I’ve pushed the right buttons and taken care of it.”)

From age five, Weaver played junior squash at the Philadelphia Cricket Club, then Germantown Friends School. “The more targets I hit in a clinic, the more candy I got,” she says of her earliest days as a court rat. “Given my sweet tooth, it was quite an incentive.”

Weaver, now 29, won her first junior national title at 12, then two U.S. Junior Open titles and three closed national junior titles by 16. She was a four-time representative of Team USA at the World Junior Championships, then a four-time All-American and All-Ivy League player and co-captain at Princeton before turning pro in 2018 (when, truth be told, she briefly lived in Manhattan). Today, based on the locale of her covey of coaches, she travels to Connecticut, but is mostly at home in Fitler Square, a 15-minute walk from the Specter Center.

Weaver solidified herself in the world’s top 10 during the 2022-2023 Professional Squash Association season. The global tour, which includes 15 to 18 major events, is a grind, but like the sport has modeled­ equity since the 2013 U.S. Open at Drexel,­ when US Squash made headlines by announcing equal prize money for men and women. While there had been women’s­ pros for decades prior, it made a career in squash more possible for women.

Internationally, Egypt remains the bull’s-eye, especially in the women’s game. World Nos. 1, 2, and 3 — Nouran Gohar, Nour ElSherbini, and Hania El Hammamy — ­are Egyptian. SquashTV, the official streaming platform for professional squash, just released a six-part documentary on the trio. Called The Big Three, it prompts the question “What about No. 4?”

“I think I’d like to make a new documentary,” Weaver says.

“What would you title it?”

“Hmm. How about How No. 4 Took Out the Big Three?”

There’s no guarantee that squash will be included in the Olympics beyond 2028, and with just 32 singles positions available, nothing’s a given. Whether or not it’s a one-off, Weaver’s not alone in the quest for what will likely be the lone American women’s spot. Amanda Sobhy (previously ranked No. 3 in the world) was the long-assumed great American hope, a role her younger sister Sabrina (ranked as high as No. 14 in her career) could still fulfill, but both are recovering from injuries. Amanda’s beaten each of the Egyptians. Weaver has not (in fact, she’s 0-26 combined against the “Big Three”), but she’s beaten Amanda. Sabrina lives in Philly (Amanda recently left the city for Florida), but, no surprise, the squashers are born of an Egyptian father and teaching pro. (The U.S. team has started taking its juniors to the source, the Egyptian Junior Open, each August to test their quality.)

The undaunted Weaver, who will have to retain her No. 1 U.S. rank to become an Olympian, remains rooted: “For my exposure to the game, I have Philly to thank,” she says.

The Bowden sisters never had the chance to travel to Egypt, but once they had rackets in hand, they saw themselves as the Venus and Serena Williams of squash. “One hundred percent,” Bowden says. “That’s how we carried ourselves.”

Squash grounded her, Bowden says, providing an outlet to release personal and family frustration. “As a kid, I took all my feelings out on the squash ball,” she says. “You shoot a basketball, but in squash, you hit something.”

For her, a postgrad year at Mercersburg Academy followed Simon Gratz High, then she played two years at Mount Holyoke. But after the successive deaths of three strong female family figures, she returned home. Quinetta, who was at Merrimack College, did too, then finished at Penn State-Abington. Now, working with kids who mirror their upbringing to further propel the diversity in squash is a must for the sisters.

One of Bowden’s charges at Specter, Malachi McCall, recently asked her, “What kept you going as a kid?” “I told him squash was my escape,” Bowden says. “I needed to be here, not [at home].”

Her first year back at SquashSmarts, in 2016, she won the Youth Coach of the Year award for both the Philadelphia Coaches Conference and Up2US Sports. She left in 2022 to write and self-publish Awaken the Warrior — Daily Affirmations for Teens and Young Adults, and returned in January after her father’s death. Of the 18 SquashSmarts staffers (11 full-time), 60 percent are alumni like the Bowdens. “Grown in our own soil,” Stephen Gregg beams.

“Something my dad always talked to me about was my voice and how it could be effective,” Bowden says. “My voice is important, and I’m using it here. Our communities tend to get scuffed. I’m not a fan of that.”

The way Ned Edwards sees the expansion that’s fueling opportunity and squash’s popularity, the city has become the torchbearer of the sport: “The anchor’s certainly Philadelphia, but the future, too, is being driven by Philadelphia.”

Published as “Raising a Racquet” in the June 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.