|
Last Updated: Oct 16th, 2008 - 13:33:17 |
They weave between each other on the court, whipping a small ball at the wall, breaking away to let the opponent have a shot. Some say it's like a dance. The former rugby player in the group amends the thought: It's a violent, bruising dance; not ballet.
The assembled group brings different reasons for playing the game, but they are here after class and work, in the Auraria gymnasium, as part of the Metro Squash Club.
The club was formed in January, less than a year ago, by a Metro professor and a staff member who happened to run into each other at the right time.
"In December I came down here when I heard there was a squash court," said club co-founder and Metro IT staff member Herman Sherman. "I reserved the court, only to find it was being used for storage. I met Dean Bacalzo there and he also had a squash racket, so we talked and decided to try to get the court back and start a club on campus."
Bacalzo, a professor in Industrial Design, has been the club president since its beginning in January. The two men worked throughout December to get the school to clean up one of the two squash courts in the gymnasium, while the other court remains a room for the campus' mixed martial arts clubs.
Now that they had a court, the next step was finding players for the club. As squash is a fairly obscure sport in the western United States, few people immediately jumped at the chance to play squash at Metro.
Then racquetball players at the courts next door to the squash court began to take notice of the game. Bacalzo says that raquetball is to squash as checkers is to chess and some players moved over to the more strategic game.
"I wanted to move around more," Metro student Mike Zehnder said. "I was at the point with racquetball where I would beat opponents without really even having to move."
Former raquetball players make up some of the 25 club members, but another recruiting tool has been in Bacalzo's industrial design classes.
"I was in Dean's class and he began the first day with slides of what the class would teach," Dustyn Hadler said. "The last slide was a recruitment poster for the squash club. I had never heard of the game before but I decided to try it out."
Hadler thought it would be an easy sport to pick up after learning more and went into his first game, against a much older Sherman, confident that he could play well.
"That first game I was running all over the floor, diving for shots," Hadler said. "I played rugby throughout high school and this was the hardest I had ever played."
Hadler quickly realized why Sherman likes the game of squash so much after originally being a racquetball player. The fast and slow tempo of the game means that power may not always work to your advantage when an opposing player can make the ball drop quickly after hitting the far wall.
"It's a great sport to get old with," Sherman said. "You don't have to use power and you get a lot of exercise."
The club is much more than just a chance to run around and get fit. Bacalzo has set up drills and games to help the players improve. The president himself is trying to progress as well from his humble beginnings trying out the game while working overseas in Taiwan.
"I started playing in Taiwan and I got beat by women, men, kids," he said. "I was hooked."
Years later Bacalzo is the 2008 Colorado State Squash Champion in the 3.5 division. While a level six, the pro squash level, is not in the professor's sights, his goal is to be at level five, which is a top player in the region.
Whether he makes it to that level or not, he has spread the love of the game of squash to Metro where industrial design students meet former racquetball players and others who have found a game that was hidden under storage just one year ago.
|
|
|
