February has 29 days this year, which is rare, but nowhere near as rare as new squash courts opening up in Manhattan! We’ve now been officially open for a month and I hope you’ll agree that with every passing day we get a little bit better – and there’s still so much more to come! Some things you know about: the Cafe and laundry service (both coming soon) and some things we’re keeping secret until they are working and we can surprise you. This week we’d like to announce Box Leagues, Yoga and the return of DoubleDot.
But before we announce Box Leagues, we would like to celebrate our League Teams. We have fielded teams in every division including the 3.0 (where we are 5th out of 6 teams), 3.5 (8th out of 13), 4.0 (11th/16), 4.5 (10th/12), 5.0 (8th/12), 5.5 (6th/6 – but we’ve had some super close matchups), Open (2nd/10 -impressive!), and Women’s ABC (4th/10). Given we weren’t officially open until January and league started two months earlier that’s an incredible achievement. Every single team is getting better (and bigger) with every match – look for us to do better in the 2nd half of the season than the 1st. And congrats to the Open team for being in 2nd place!
Box Leagues
Box Leagues are a super fun way to get to know people at your level. We’ll put you in the league we think you fit based on your rating – or if you don’t have a rating John Musto will give his professional SWAG. If you win your box you get promoted and if you don’t do quite so well we’ll put you in a league where you can! You’ll get to know other community members, have fun and feed that competitive spirit. John Musto will send out a separate email with the details or if you are super keen please reach out to him at John.Musto@TheSquashCenter.org.
Yoga
We’re going to start offering yoga classes the week of Feb 17th. To begin the schedule will be pretty limited because we’re not entirely sure what y’all will sign up for. We will start by offering two kinds of classes on Mondays and Wednesdays:
– A Traditional One Hour Class at lunchtime that will be held on court starting at 12:15pm
– “Warm-up” and/or “Cool-down” yoga sessions. These unique classes of our own invention will be short 35 min sessions held in the fitness area. They will start 5 mins after each court session and end 5 mins before giving you enough time to get on and off court. We’re offering this because we believe that warming up and cooling down helps prevent injury, makes you fitter and enables you to maximize your time on court. For the first two weeks all of these classes will be free as we experiment to see what works. We’ll start by offering them at 6:35pm and 7:20pm on Tuesday and Thursday (they are open to both peak and off-peak members). But again, let us know if you’d like them at other times.
Your instructor will the the inimitable Emma-Kate Croghan who has been life-long student of yoga, understand the trials and tribulations of squash players (she’s played and she’s married to an enthusiast who you just might know) and got her 200 hour yoga teaching certification in 2007.
DoubleDot
DoubleDot – the monthly round robin for people who work in the media and technology businesses – is back! It went on hiatus nearly two years ago after hosting over 50 events and with 150 members due primarily to a lack of courts – but hey – we fixed that (now you know the true motivation behind building Manhattan Squash). You should get a separate email about our re-launch (scheduled for Thursday, February 13th). If you don’t or if you’d like to know more please let me know (James.Green@TheSquashCenter.org) and we’ll add you to the list. Membership is free and the criteria (spelled out here) is simple and open.
That’s the announcements for the first week in February. Until next week remember not to boast – just keep it deep,
James.