Served and returned by Kate Seager (she/her)
If Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers didn’t make you pine after long summer evenings spent at the local small town tennis club of your childhood, then I can only hope this year’s Olympic Games will. A Euro-summer in Paris while the sport gods of our society jog around the city of light like it’s no big deal—catch me skiving off my parent’s SkyGo for the foreseeable. No matter where you stand on Paris’ bold decision to host the biggest sporting event on the calendar (see: 2023 Rugby World Cup bed bugs debacle, poor infrastructure, and #JeChieDansLaSeineLe23Juin) I think sport is cool. You should think so too.
I’ve played squash since I was eight years old. It’s a sport not many have heard of. Most get into squash through their parents—if you’re lucky to have parents who are prepared to take you to tournaments on the weekend and training during the week, it becomes addictive. However if you don’t, the drop-off is quite significant—particularly in girls. Unlike tennis, squash isn’t the easiest sport to pick up, but maybe that’s because not as many people grow up with it. I watched as my high school peers tried to get into it (yuh), appealing due to the fact that it’s “basically an indoor version of tennis,” but they slowly dwindled away once they realised the ball isn’t as forgiving and squash actually requires a fair amount of running. What didn’t help was that high school is ripe with judgemental teenage girls and puberty (woohoo!). It makes sense that girls preferred to play netball, hockey or football, sports they’ve likely spent their whole lives playing, rather than try a new one. What began as a fairly strong group of girls, eager to learn, quickly became five of us who’d already been playing together for years beforehand.
Which is where the girly-pop-ification of sport comes into play.
As much as I’d love to gatekeep squash from the girlies who play for the aesthetic, it’s about time more girls played a sport I truly love. Squash New Zealand has been trying to figure this out for as long as I can remember. If we look to see how other sports have retained a large proportion of women in the past, we may find the answer. If there’s one thing I know to be true is that girls love pop culture, which, if used tactically, can make previously unheard of sports trendy. This is possibly the greatest asset for the squash community right now.
When Bend It Like Beckham came out in 2002, women’s football wasn’t a professional sport. More than twenty years later, football has become the most popular sport among women in the UK. Last year I found myself infatuated with the Women's FIFA World Cup when I previously had no interest in football. Perhaps it was because Aotearoa was hosting. Perhaps it was Sam Kerr. Perhaps I had just got around to watching Bend It Like Beckham around the same time. More likely, though, was the marketing of the World Cup. By onboarding New Zealand and Australian it-girls BENEE and Mallrat for the FIFA World Cup theme song, football suddenly became iconic as fuck. Not only did it appeal to the girls, gays, and seemingly the entire nation, but I found myself signing up for social football later that year.
More recently, Challengers has made tennis sexy again. While the Williams sisters and Naomi Osaka have kept the women's side of tennis engaging over the past few decades, I’ve often found the men’s draws pretty mid. While tennis has remained consistently popular over my lifetime, Challengers has reignited the men’s side of the sport especially. With the tennis season starting to ramp up in the northern hemisphere, I’d be prepared for your Instagram to be flooded with your mates sitting courtside, living their best Euro-summer, with the Challengers soundtrack in the background.
Not to mention Formula 1 and the impact Drive To Survive has had on the sport’s popularity among young women (see: Lando Norris).
Unfortunately for squash, the girly-pop-ification is a few years off yet. It’s been announced as an official Olympic sport for Los Angeles 2028, a move that’s bound to popularise squash globally. It’s my hope that while the cooler months descend on Aotearoa a few years from now, girls watch squash at the Olympics and feel inspired to take up a new winter sport. Growing up, I spent far too many training sessions being the only girl in the room—the girly-pop-ification of squash can’t come soon enough.
If you’re interested in getting ahead of the trend and playing the predicted “it-girl sport of 2028”, Te Herenga Waka has their own squash club. They meet every Wednesday night from 7-9pm at Club Kelburn and you can find them on Instagram (@vuwsquash) and Facebook (Victoria University Squash Club). For those who are interested in playing more competitively, Thorndon Club hosts club nights on Thursday and Sunday, and has various Interclub teams for a range of levels.