Chapter 6 - When the Courts Go Quiet

Decline rarely announces itself, and Squash's decline was precisely the kind that arrives dressed as stability — membership numbers slightly down but surely recovering, courts quieter at shoulder hours but still full on Saturday mornings. The economic conditions of the late 1980s, rising interest rates and softening real estate values, made the squash court a difficult asset to justify, and the one-way ratchet of court closures began to turn — once closed, courts were rarely replaced. The sport's governing bodies responded by presenting participation data in the most favourable possible light, relying on historical numbers rather than current surveys, breaking the feedback loop that would have allowed the leadership to see the problem clearly. Egypt went in the opposite direction, building a squash culture of extraordinary depth that would eventually produce multiple generations of world champions, proving that the sport's decline in Western markets was not inevitable but the product of specific institutional failures.