From British Columbia in Canada, Nicole Bunyan discovered squash at ten years old, and it took her through Princeton and onto the world professional tour. She’s also a broadcaster with the Professional Squash Association and has her own squash fitness and coaching business, Squashletic. She trains regularly at Open Squash, and we’re delighted she sat down with us recently to tell us more about her journey through the game.
Hailing from Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, Nicole was the daughter of squash players who grew up around the courts. She mainly enjoyed playing team sports like soccer, and preferred the social buzz that came along with it. Her mom had forced her into doing tapdancing, and Nicole begged to be allowed to give it up. Mom said, “only if you take up something else instead,” so Nicole began playing squash with her best friend. Doing the sport with a good friend, and with a good coach, is what made it stick, she said, and Nicole’s best friend also ended up playing for Cornell, while Nicole went to Princeton.
“I didn't start out playing squash intending to go to Princeton,” she said. “I wasn't even aware of the whole getting recruited to Ivy League universities thing, which is obviously a lot more prevalent now. But, when I got to high school, I started to learn more about it, and I kind of had this idea in the back of my head. I don't really know where it came from, that Princeton was my dream university, and then it ended up happening, which is amazing.”
Nicole had to work hard on her SATs, which was a challenge because Canada doesn’t do a lot of standardized testing. She also had to work hard on her squash to get to the right level—a late arrival to squash compared to many of the top juniors, she also broke her right arm the year before heading to Princeton. Fortunately, the college had already recruited her. Graduating with a biology degree, Nicole thought she might become a doctor, but realized her fascination was more with human performance. That’s why she’s focused on personal training and human performance as she’s pushed ahead on the squash court. She moved to New York and found a job working as a personal trainer. Growing up, she had taught spin classes as a teenager and even had a health and fitness blog. “It was very dorky,” she said. “It was a daily blog that I wrote. And that was kind of how I would satisfy that need for health and fitness and then I started obviously working in that field.”
Now, she runs Squashletic, a training app for squash players focused mostly on the physical side of the game.
“There's so many components that are overlooked and no one, really dives into,” she said. “I think a lot of coaches obviously focus on the on-court stuff, but don't know a lot about, conditioning, strength training, mobility work, warming up and cooling down, all that sort of stuff, or even the technical movement aspects as well. And that's my forte. That's what I enjoy.”
During Covid, Nicole took the business online.
“I had the time and the space to be able to think about my future, rather than just be stuck in the rat race of the next tournament,” she said. “So, it’s been about three or four years that I've been working on Squashletic.”
Nicole still does personal training with some people in-person, but most of her program now takes place online. She started playing on the professional tour in the 2015 season, taking a last-minute flight to Monaco to compete in a tournament. By 2018, she was competing fulltime.
“It was the right decision for me personally to not go straight into playing squash full time because I needed money,” she said. “I needed a visa as well. Obviously, I'm Canadian, so I can't just be here on my own. I needed to legally be here. So, I was able to have that sponsored and then, yeah. I also really wanted to explore the personal training side and get some hands-on experience with that, which I'm glad I did, because without that I wouldn't have been able to do squash, which is how I live now. You know, that's how I don't make money. From the squash tour.”
Nicole reached number 39 in the world and has managed to cover the cost of living through winning tournaments. She recently found her first sponsor in Richardson Wealth, a wealth management firm in Canada, but has been reflecting recently on how important it is to be able to finance good preparation on the squash tour. From food to coaching, having a mental coach, a technical coach, squash coaches, strength and conditioning coaches, a nutritionist, that’s a lot of people to pay for. Players in the top five might be able to finance that kind of team, but everyone else on tour must scrap for it. Nicole has also been able to do some commentating on the tour over the last year, and it’s contributed to her budget, too. Over the last year, she has been less focused on improving her rating. People tend to be focused on how high a number she wants to get, but last season, she got beaten by a few players with lower rankings. She realized it was important to step away from the results and focus instead on what sort of squash she was producing.
“You’re not guaranteed to win, even if you feel you should,” she said. “And I was feeling this expectation just for myself, really. And so, I had to step away from that. And that was freeing. And I was able to get much better performances in the second half of the season.”
Nicole continues to write blogs rounding up her match experiences, and has a healthy Instagram following where she writes about results and how the tour is going. She has written a lot about improving her fitness, but lately, has also focused on the mental game.
“I realized in the fall when I was losing because of mental reasons,” she said. “I just didn't have much confidence in in my abilities. You know, I was stepping on court, and I wasn't really sure what I was trying to do, as silly as that sounds. So, I did a couple things. I introduced a couple new people to my coaching staff, like Amr Khalifa, who works here. He's been great. And taking a different approach, which has been really helpful”
She has been trying to get more aggressive on court in a way that suits her personality.
“A lot of people have told me over the years, you need to be more intense,” she said. “You need to be mean. But that is not what I enjoy about sport. It's not about killing the other person or crushing the other person. I enjoy the competition and the fight, but it's really more about a personal satisfaction than it is about feeling like I'm just better than someone, you know, it's more about me than it is about them.”
Sometimes, that’s been to Nicole’s detriment, she concedes.
“Working with Amr, he's been helpful to try and help me spin this, for lack of a better word, aggression or this or this purpose and intent in a more positive way that makes you feel like you're being proactive rather than, so defensive, which is how I was feeling.”
She’s also worked on having a gameplan before stepping on court. She focused on having three things, ‘x, y, and z’, before stepping on court.
“I think x was be tough to beat, right? Which encompasses a few things, right? If you're going for cheap shots, you're not making yourself tough to beat, right? If you're not chasing every ball down and trying your hardest to get the ball, you're not making yourself tough to beat, right? Going for a crappy shot off the serve. It encompasses like a few tactical things, I think, into one that might mean something else to something different to everyone else. But for me, those are the main components.”
The second thing was to get in front of her opponents, visualizing where she wanted to be on the court, and having some flexibility in terms of which shot she wanted to hit to get there.
“Then the third thing was about picking my opportunities and being gutsy and trusting myself to take the ball,” she said. “And if it's there, you take it in and accept you're going to make a couple of mistakes. But keep doing it.”
She beat Mariam Metwally at the Florida Open in five games. “That was a big turnaround,” she said.
Canada’s national coach, Graham Williams, helped Nicole a lot with the mental part of the game.
“At the Commonwealth Games, even when I was going through this rut in the fall, I had this peak at the Pan Am games where I actually performed really well,” she said. “And he was there and I realized, okay, I need to, I need to get more of that. So after that, I started speaking with him more and he's in Philly. So, it's not even like we get on court very often. But you know, we just check in and we talk before matches and he helps me keep up to date on what I'm working on. And yeah, he's phenomenal.”
Over the coming years, Nicole wants to continue focusing on the business.
“I have discovered I quite like digital marketing and copywriting and the aspects kind of fall under that umbrella,” she said. “So I'd actually like to help other sports coaches be able to develop and perhaps market their skills online.”
She also wants to become the number one squash player in Canada—she beat Holly Naughton in January in “probably my best match I’ve ever played, but then she beat me in nationals a couple of months later, so obviously I can’t rest on that. But it’s certainly a challenge.”
Thanks for sharing your perspectives with us, Nicole!
You can also watch a video version of this interview at our Boast About It show here!