How I Built an Internationally Recognized Squash Club from Scratch
In 2017, I started actively toying with the idea of building a squash club and decided to go for it. Objectively, what started as a passion project, ended up, at its height, a reputable international brand within a niche and growing sport. As squash finally gains Olympic inclusion for LA ’28 (something I had hoped for during my club’s days) and US Squash works to find its footing with the challenges of operating its massive new facility and meeting Olympic targets (easy by no means), I have returned to thinking about my own experience. Below is a reflection on what I think we did right: double down on community as the fundamental agent of growth. I hope this can serve as a framework for any startup or business. In any event, a piece on the mistakes I made would be way too long…
When I opened INFINITUM, we faced two major challenges in driving growth: building a community from scratch and making a niche sport appealing to a broader audience. At launch, we had zero members — and no means to make group play feasible in the traditional way a squash club environment thrives. During our first open house, we had three people show up: a 12-year-old girl, a 25-year-old male ex-college lacrosse player, and a 55-year-old woman who had never played before. Age, athleticism, physicality, and knowledge of the game were completely mismatched and the idea of putting any of these three players on court together in a productive way was daunting. We realized that if we were going to get anywhere, we had to find a way to make it work. Our solution was to develop a system of ‘level-adjusting play.’ We came up with a series of simple conditions in gameplay and drills that could adjust the difficulty of the challenge by player, making play more difficult for one player and less difficult for the other, thereby bringing levels closer together and keeping things competitive and fun.
Simultaneously, in an effort to make the sport appealing to a broader demographic, we reinvented the rulebook on how squash is taught. Using golf as a frame of reference, we took a technically-focused approach to instruction, breaking down grip, stroke, movement and tactics into a series of fundamental principles that were applicable to the full range of ages and abilities — a major departure from the physically-focused and level-specific coaching that I received as a player. On a more philosophical level, we worked to develop a conceptual coaching framework, rather than a prescriptive one, making our coaching principles adaptable to the individual rather than rigidly based on level or ability. We also worked intensely on inclusivity, emphasizing the importance of mixing ages, levels, genders and making our environment as welcoming for girls and women as it was for men, something not often present in the oldboy squash club ethos that pervades the US — or at least did at the time.
Concurrent to all of this, we launched a YouTube channel specifically focused on sharing our fundamentals in a clear and concise manner, while simultaneously advertising our program. Within a few months of launching our channel, we had thousands of subscribers and millions of views (big numbers for a squash channel). Two years in, the club had hundreds of memberships, clients from five continents, and was being selected to host elite tournaments, winning out over traditional squash powerhouses such as Harvard and Phillips Andover, which had just built a $30 million squash complex, in contrast to my $400K bootstrapped facility where my landlord acted as the GM to cut costs and we built our own off-brand courts.
I made all sorts of mistakes with this business (and learned a lot in the process) and ultimately we closed during the pandemic, but we really hit the nail on the head in terms of how to grow a community from scratch. The diversity of our client base that had kept me up at night panicked about how we were going to ramp with projections, ultimately was the distinguishing factor in the value-add of our program. The fact that we figured out how to make lemonade from lemons and the community we were able to build as a result was ultimately what took us from a small passion project to a reputable international brand within the game.