by Alex Akins, ‘18
Editor’s note: While this appears to be an article about the English Premiership, it is actually about the Squash team.
West “Harm” have an outstanding amount of first team players injured. Winston Reid, West Ham’s best defender, will be out for 4-6 weeks according to a tweet from the team owner’s son. Winston is the sixth starter who is currently injured. The rest being Moses, Payet, Valencia, Sakho, and Lanzini. Fortunately for West Ham, they have the easiest part of their schedule this year. The next three fixtures are against Stoke, Swansea (who have parted ways with Manager Gary Monk), and Aston Villa. But without the six starters, West Ham could mess this up. Manager Slaven Bilic has already changed his style of play back to the “Old” West Ham style, which got Manager Sam Allardyce fired. Bilic is without his best defender, his best striker, and his best creator. When West Ham played against Manchester United they sat back and attempted to counter attack the entire match, which resulted in a 0-0 draw.
Lucky for me, I didn’t watch the game as I was with the “B” squash team in Buffalo, New York, which is a regional city in the area.
University School faced off against the Gow School’s Varsity and Canisius’ Junior Varsity.
The tournament did not go as well as the team expected. Only Jack Sazima, ’18, Eli Kaufman, ’17, and Javon Johnson, ’18, won matches. Sazima and Kaufman won two matches while Javon won one. In Jack’s first win he played a man twice his size (Jack is 7’2” and 400 lbs of cut steel) and came back from 2-0 down to win three games in a row.
My games did not go as well. I lost my first game 3-0 to someone who I had played before. Every time I thought I had him, he would nonchalantly hit a perfect drop shot. Nonetheless I was very angry going into my second match. It was payback time.
My second match was against a boy half my size (I later found out this person to be in 7th grade). On the court I invented, “Chicago Rules Squash”. Early in the match my opponent did not get out of the way fast enough and I swung my racket through his legs, hard enough to make the back bounce off of the back wall. Instead of checking if my opponent was okay, I checked my racket first. I would like to formally apologize to this seventh grader wherever he is, as this match only gets worse from here.
In Squash it is illegal to grip the ball with your racket and fling it onto the wall. This is called a Carry. My opponent carried the ball quite a lot, but according to the Ref of the match, my opponent had to call them on himself. In the last game where it was tied 2-2 I had enough.
In the heat of the moment I screamed at this poor child, “YOU HAVE TO CALL YOUR CARRIES!” The Refs were not happy with me, likely because they aren’t from Chicago. Neither am I. In the last few points of the game I was down and my opponent was again in my way. Instead of playing the game the correct way, by calling a let, I ran down my opponent and he flew into the back wall. Once again the refs were very upset with me. I eventually lost and apologized to the seventh grader for my ungentlemanly actions on the court. Once again, I apologized to my opponent. I bowed to him with respect and left the arena to a cascade of boos.
Moral of the story, Chicago is a morally corrupt city and never follow any of their rules. West Ham are currently facing adversity, and only the best teams get through it. The Squash team will look to improve upon the disappointing result, and I will stop throwing seventh graders across squash courts.
