Squash
Squash
For over 1,000 years man has invented and enjoyed a variety of games played by hitting a ball with either a closed fist – as in “fives” or “bunch of fingers” – or with some form of bat or racket. Around the year 1148 the French played “le Paume”, meaning “the palm of the hand”, which developed into Jeu de Paume, Real Tennis, Royal Tennis or, if you play the sport, simplImage_SportsSquashy Tennis. At sometime in the early 19th century this obsession with rackets and balls spawned another variety of the sport in the unlikely birthplace of the Fleet Prison in London.The prisoners in “The Fleet”, mainly debtors, took their exercise by hitting a ball against walls, of which there were many, with rackets and so started the game of “Rackets”. Rackets progressed, by some strange route, to Harrow and other select English schools about 1820 and it was from this source that our own sport of Squash, or Squash Rackets, developed.squashSquash was invented in Harrow school around 1830, when the pupils discovered that a punctured Rackets ball, which “squashed” on impact with the wall, produced a game with a greater variety of shots and required much more effort on the part of the players, who could not simply wait for the ball to bounce back to them as with Rackets. The variant proved popular and in 1864 the first four. Squash courts were constructed at the school and Squash was officially founded as a sport in its own right. A match is the best of five games. Each game is to nine points, unless the score reaches eight-all. At eight-all the receiver (non-server) has to choose to play either to nine points (known as “Set One”) or to ten points (known as “Set Two”). (There is no requirement that a player needs to be two points ahead to win a game). Points are scored only by the server. When the server wins a rally he or she scores a point; when the receiver wins a rally he or she becomes the server. A Squash court dimension is 62.43M2 and the area of three walls – front and two sidewalls is 1065 sq. ft whereas the area of four walls – front, two sidewalls and one back wall is 1207 sq. ft.