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Squash is a
fantastic game sometimes described as "chess at 100mph."
Squash was invented in Harrow school around
1830, when the pupils discovered that a punctured Rackets
ball, which "squashed" on impact with the wall, produced a
game with a greater variety of shots and required much more
effort on the part of the players, who could not simply wait
for the ball to bounce back to them as with Rackets. The variant
proved popular and in 1864 the first four Squash courts were
constructed at the school and Squash was officially founded
as a sport in its own right.
In those early days Squash,
as with all other sports, was without any form of international
standardisation and it was inevitable that slight variations
in the way it was played, and the equipment used, would occur.
Luckily only two main streams of activity followed, one in
England with its 21 feet wide courts and "soft" ball and the
other in North America, with its 18.5 feet wide courts and
"hard" ball and with both courts having the same length of
32 feet the universality of Squash was not seriously challenged.
We will look at these two branches separately and also at
the way in which Squash spread to almost every nation in the
world.
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