Earlier this month, in honor of both Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day (March 8th,) Open Squash hosted our biggest celebration of women’s squash yet. We welcomed over 40 women and girls into our FiDi club for a night of fun, fitness, squash, and socializing!
Open Squash FiDi was transformed into a pink-and-purple haven for women’s squash last Friday. “She believed she could so she did” read our decorative balloons, and they set the tone for the night…
The event started with a 30-minute open house style welcome, where participants signed in, grabbed their t-shirts and some other Open Squash merch (think friendship bracelets & stickers) and got to know each other.
Our enthusiastic coaches Hannah Craig and Ciara Richards were also on hand to give advice on some of our workshop materials about ghosting, solo practice and movement drills.
Once everyone was ready and signed in we headed to the glass court to take a group picture with our wonderful photographer, Eliza Kommer. Our one-of-a-kind International Women’s Day t-shirts featured the flags of all the women who play at our club… we counted 23 different flags!!
Once we kicked off the squash at 7pm, we had at least 4 women on every single one of our eight courts until 8:30pm. Our coaches were also busy jumping on court to hit with everyone and get involved.
The fun didn’t stop when the squash ended- our incredible staff including Adriana, Maddy, Ona, and Sarah were busy setting up our rooftop space on the 28th floor with food and drinks for after the event.
We had tacos, quesadillas, nachos, squash-ball brownies, mini cakes, and plenty of refreshments. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the food and drinks, and spent around an hour at the rooftop eating, drinking, socializing, and making new friends.
One of the things we loved the most about this event was seeing all the new friends and playing partners made. We had many of our incredible women tell us that thanks to the event, they’ve now found a new person to play with every week.
There is a misconception that there aren’t a lot of women in sports, but this is not true. Events like these are incredibly important to helping grow and foster our women’s community here, and to help connect women with people to play with, even when it can seem like there aren’t many other women out there- there are!
At Open Squash, we recognize how important the women’s community is. We have six women coaches and multiple women’s-only programming at both our clubs, all of which you can find here for FiDi and here for Bryant Park.
We also LOVE throwing these bigger events, which is why we do so every month! Our next women’s-only round robin and workshop will be on April 5th at Bryant Park, then May 2nd at FiDi and June 6th at FiDi. All the information on these can be found here or on our women’s Instagram @opensquashwomen
We want to say a huge “Thank You” to everyone who came, to our coaches and our staff, to all the women who play at Open Squash and everywhere else, and to Open Squash for being committed to making squash available to all.