Nakusp Squash Club looks for members to come swing away

This racket sport will keep you moving and in shape.

The Nakusp Squash Club, which once had 150 members in the area, has shrunk over the years and with numbers dwindling, president of the club Bill Sones is looking for active residents in the area to come out and try their hand at the sport.

“(We had) about a dozen members last year,” says Sones. “We’re just starting with this year and trying to get things going.”

Sones himself has played squash for 30 years, spanning from his years in university to his last 20 years in Nakusp. The season runs October through March every year and is generally known as a winter sport.

“It’s very fast,” he says. “You get a workout quickly.”

The sport is similar to racquetball, explains Sones. The court is a “big box” with lines on the front wall 18 inches up from the ground and down from the ceiling, and diagonal lines down the sides. There are server-boxes, and the main point of the game is to keep a rally going for as long as possible, or to make your opponent work to keep the rally going.

“You have to put in quite a few hours before you get to the point where you can play a long rally,” says Sones. “It’s more techniques than in racquetball ... it’s more just learning how to hit the ball.”

He says it may take longer to get into the groove of controlling the small rubber ball and placing it on the wall, but local enthusiasts are more than willing to help out beginners in getting started.

“Beginners do have fun,” explains Sones. He likened the sport to badminton or tennis, saying those with the hand-eye co-ordination from playing those sports may pick up squash a bit more easily. In squash, there are three different types of rubber balls. Yellow, orange and blue dotted balls are measured by how fast they travel in the court depending on how hard they’re hit and how long a rally goes on. “The better the players, the harder they’re hitting, the faster it goes. That’s why they use yellow dots. Beginners are more likely to use blue dots because they aren’t hitting it as hard. They’ll have a lot more fun using blue dots because they’ll bounce even if you don’t hit it very hard.”

In joining the club, you receive a key to the court in the Nakusp & Arrow Lakes Community Complex. One problem is finding a racket or the rubber balls in town as currently there is no one selling them. Sones says it’s easy to pick these items up from online sites or to pick them up when out of town in a larger centre. Memberships are available at Advantage Travel World in Nakusp.

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