By James Zug
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Lasell Gymnasium, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Sunday morning, February 28, 1993. The 40th annual championship weekend of the New England Interscholastic Squash Association (NEISA) was the place for a palace revolution.
After three-quarters of a century, the softball versus hardball babble—about issues like the globalization, the Olympics, world championships, who standardized first (the US did), which game was easier to learn or harder to master, the defection of Canada, the decline of the hardball pro tour—went silent before the one final arbitrator: numbers. Because the sun never set over the British Empire, more people followed the Brits than the Yankees. We had Canada, the US and Mexico; they had the world. What was amazing was not that we switched in 1993, but that hardball was so vibrant that it managed to survive as the game of choice in the US until 1993.
Ned Gallagher, president of NEISA, moved to modify the association’s by-laws to require a two-thirds plurality, rather than a simple majority, in any vote on switching to softball. The motion passed with ease. Malcolm MacColl, the chair of the USSRA junior committee and a guest at the meeting (his son played at Belmont Hill) gave the coaches the official USSRA line about not abandoning hardball altogether. The coaches examined the situation from all sides. Only five NEISA schools had access to softball courts. But juniors were clamoring to play softball. After two hours of discussion, Gallagher asked for a roll call vote. Twenty-two coaches voted to switch to softball, seven to keep hardball. With the new by-law requiring a two-thirds majority, softball won by just a single vote.
“We knew this was monumental,” Gallagher later said. “We sat in the room and said, ‘Wow. Are we really willing to do this? Can we really go it alone?’ We had one foot in the water and the question was whether we could jump in.” MacColl went outside to a pay phone and called George Haggarty, the USSRA president, in Detroit. “You won’t believe it, George,” he said.
“Why? What’s happened?” Haggarty asked.
“The prep schools have just switched to softball.”
“You’re kidding.”
It was no joke. The dominoes fell immediately. The prep school girls switched. The college women switched. The juniors switched. And in April 1994 the college men switched. In only 14 months hardball had more or less capitulated. Canada switched over a two-decade period, slowly weaning themselves from doubles boasts and reverse corners. We did it overnight, a midnight massacre.
There was a new vocabulary for softball, a strange patois of drives and strokes and working boasts and “game balls.” You were no longer a comfortably vague B or D player but a noxiously detailed, European-style 3.5 or 2.0. Like carpetbaggers heading into the South in the 1870s, overseas coaches and players streamed into what was now a ripe arena of reconstruction. In 2002 the pros at a majority of the elite East Coast clubs were softball players from other countries. In 2001-02 over half of the All-Americans in both men’s and women’s intercollegiate squash were not Americans and the Trinity men’s varsity, that year winning their fourth straight national championship, had only a single native-born player in its top nine.
(To read the full article on The State of the Game, get your copy of Squash Magazine’s February 2003 issue today!)
More State of Squash: What has technology wrought? Read the thoughts of World No. 13 Chris Walker.
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