The NYT ran a story yesterday about how aspiring Ivy league parents are trying to get their children admitted as athletic recruits … in squash:
Squash pros and coaches say that in the last few years the sport has seen a sharp increase in participation by children and teenagers, some of whose parents seem to have one eye on the ball and the other on college applications. [Link]
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p>Grey lady, please. This is so Opal Mehta meets the Spice Girls, that is, this is old news for subcontinental strivers. Here’s an article from the TOI from 5 years ago:
Do you know the easiest way to book a free seat in an American Ivy League college? No, you do not have to secure the highest marks in your GRE/GMAT examinations. Just being a good squash player, should suffice… over a dozen squash players from Mumbai have made it to the American Ivy League, purely on the strength of the racquet sport…Indians stand the best chance with squash, because, there is little competition in this sport. [Link]
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Siddhartha Suchde is the top player at the top Ivy School (Harvard has won 13 out of the last 16 squash championships) where he squashes his opponents with gusto:
Siddharth Suchde ’07 has played at number one in every Harvard men’s match since his sophomore year. Last season he went undefeated in all his regular-season matches and was named Ivy League Player of the Year…
“A turning point came when I was 16 and I got a call from the Indian Squash Federation asking me to play in the world junior championships,” he says. He trained hard and became captain of the Indian junior national team, which finished fifth at the tournament, the best result in India’s history. Suchde has remained on the Indian national team for the past five years. Last December he played at number three for the Indian senior national team at the world men’s team championships in Islamabad, Pakistan. (It meant missing three weeks of classes.) India finished eleventh in the tourney, one of its best performances ever. [Link]
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If squash becomes an Olympic sport in 2016, we’d finally have a sport that either India or Pakistan would have a chance of medalling in! w00t!
I noticed this, Indian international students at my college seem to have a penchant for squash. “Everyvun in India plays squash, yaar!” 🙂
From the nation that brought the trampoline and synchro to the oly’s – now we have competitve pole dancing and striptease [humor].
hey.. no worse than a game named after an insect which may make its way into the oly’s by 2020.
my little fume exhalation in #2 was about getting sports in the oly’s that desis could actually have a chance at excelling in. wasnt there some translplanted desi on the board here who found nirvana in chai-tea-latte and pole slithering?
p.s. cricket in 2020, which begs a joke starting with, “in hindsight…”
I hate how Ivy League admissions work.
This Mallu has only turned 16; that’ll give her ample time to establish herself. Also, Nicole David, the current world number one is Chindian😉
There’s also Joshna Chinappa, great granddaughter of Field Marshall KM Cariappa.
She won the british open under-19, the first indian girl to do so.
it took awhile for tennis to be an olympic sport, but it is strange to see trampolining (and i like gymnastics on the whole) ahead of tennis/squash/cricket. didn’t realize the canadians were responsible for that:)
not sure which nation actually originated it to be candid, but trampolining is an old inuit cultural practice/ritual. escapes me whether it was recreational or religious.
Godey here you go. a ref on native canadian blanket toss. i’ve seen it done with walrus skin trampolines.
Pole dancing has been around in India for ages. For instance, it is little known that the classical Kuchipudi can be done with poles. In fact, its name is Tamil for “hold the stick”.
/runs away before getting beaten with sticks
too funny. but i think you’re confusing it with that other form of classical dance – kuchiyapudi
the boy has a ways to go to be considered the best desi squash player of all time or Harvard’s best. Interestingly, Niederhoffer did square off against the 13 time world champion Khan (13 times!)
and if you’ve read Neiderhoffer’s The Education of a Speculator, life ain’t so peachy in post-bachelors squash circles. Niederhoffer was denied membership in clubs for not being a WASP or WASPish and he quit the game altogether.
khoofia, thanks for the link. interesting. don’t recall hearing of blanket toss or its connection to trampolining. not disparaging trampolining, just that there are already so many events under the gymnastics umbrella.
sorry to be intrusive, but you’re not hairy_d by another name are you?
I wonder if their ever will be a day in my life when a Indian will do something not nerdy?
Indian’s play squash and cricket and the male’s dance in movies. Just one person out of more then a billion, PLEASE, do something cool.
since when is squash nerdy? and how are you defining nerdy?
I agree with wgiia, I think it is a stretch to describe squash as nerdy and if it is I am not sure how you describe racquet ball. Shallowthinker I think it is also unreasonable to expect to increase the coolness factor, I believe the onus is on you to be as cool as you want to be and let the others be uncool.
More power to the Boys from Bombay. I think calling this a racket is a stretch. This is nothing more than a supply/demand situation.
Dude, that is TOTALLY my cousin. I mean, not really, but still.
I was at a conference recently in which someone asked a group of South Asians why South Asian parents are so obsessed with their children’s grades. A woman answered, “Well, what else are we supposed to do? We won’t get financial aid, and we’re not built for athletics.”
I almost died laughing.
maybe upper class indians. I have never seen a squash court ! Ivy League education is a racket that screws desis.
Me neither. Is it the same as the racquetball court? I played some racquetball after I arrived in the US. I hadn’t seen a tennis court either till I was 18. I was disappointed: it looks so much better on TV. In some ways the admissions process in India is a lot more egalitarian.
Does being a Kabbadi player squash my hopes of getting an ivy education?
But Tamasha, I don’t get it. Why is “not being able to get financial aid or not able to have a athletic bod” funny ? Do you mean it is funny for ABD ? I really don’t think most DBDs had access to sports facilities in India,unless from really rich families. Good grades were the only way to get financial aid in US univs.
if you look back at the history of ivy admission policies, you’ll find that the use of athletics, diminishing role of gpa and standardization, as well as subjective criteria like well-roundedness; was instituted in order to keep out jews—who as a group excelled at academics but not so much sprts and music and running for student body prez—and keep in wasps.
I have seen one! but we played cricket in it 🙂
I grew up in a residential complex built for defence employees. They did good in providing facilities Basket Ball Courts, Volley Ball Courts, Soccer Fields, Tennis Courts, Badminton Courts, Squash Courts but make a flat playable surface in India and kids will play cricket on it 😉 Eventually they had to hire security guards to shoo away the cricket kids. The curse of cricket.
so is the case in Australia. In Victoria, the only criteria for entrance to university or college is the ENTER score. It is the Class XII / High school exam conducted statewide. Everyone writes the same exam and thus these exams do not preclude kids from less developed communities / regions from doing well. Other nebuluous criteria dont matter. The only affirmative action is in the arena of fees whereby certain disadvantaged sections get additional scholarships. You still have to earn the place. No squash and lemonade. For those whose passion is Sport – they go to the taxpayer funded AIS (Australian Institute of Sport).
Wow you serious. you have squash courts at most gymkhanas in India. I played for a few years then gave up due to lack of time. I hated the double yellow balls preferred single yellow.
Don’t know abt Victoria, but in NSW you can get in uni based on athletic achievements, know a few who are on got in via cricket and rugby union.
Here is one article how they are trying to reduce Asian dominance at medical schools. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/02/1046540075208.html
mate – gymkhanas are upper class to me. Probably speaks volumes about my ‘low class’ 😉 Also gymkhanas are peculiar to the north – hardly any in South India.
It was definitely an ABD situation. Basically the woman was saying we are rich and not good at sports. Which might be true. I dunno. Maybe you had to be there.
pingpong, ak 😀
sure there’s no double entendre?
Squash – I love it. I live for it. I love it so!
I never understood this. I never played Squash in India, never watched a match. Never knew there were courts in India at all. My Squash has been an entirely American experience. Very often, some Americans (always white) would say something like “You’re really into it. Of course, you are from India. Lots of Squash there.” And I’d say “Baddaphuk? Says who? Can you name one or two famous Squash players from India?”. Then they’d go “Well, there were the famous world champions Khans from Pakistan…”.
This would come from very knowledgeable Americans. They know the difference between the two countries very well. Just shows they think it’s the same brown blob, though. Once one guy said “Funny, India was a British colony. How can there not be Squash there?” So, I said “Dude, America was once a British colony and how much Squash in America, eh?” (deliberately screwing up the chronology)
The funny thing is, in the last 2 or three years, I’ve been meeting a good number of new arrivals from India who say they’ve been plaing Squash. So, the random American player becomes accidentally right 🙂 and I’m now wrong.
Let please!
Most members are middle class to professional class. Only old south Bombay places have upper class and rich members from the business class. The trick is to get there early before the damn place is been built. thats when the need money to build the thing and take members for much lower admission fees [discounted by as much as 60% of opening rates, thats when you are taking a risk coz the place is not built yet and you don’t know the member profile] once built the fees skyrocket like crazy and in like a year or 2 of being operational it can be as high as 200 or 300% of the opening fee. And then you get these insane waiting periods.
I agree haven’t come across the term ‘gymkhana” outside of Maharashtra and Goa. I dont know much abt south india visited it only thrice.
oh yeah, squash is definitely an urban middle/upper class thing, these students I’m talking about come from those backgrounds (mostly Bombay).
btw, i can’t believe no one’s mentioned it by now. he’s cute, in a chamathu sort of way 🙂
with all due respect, i think a lot of this has to do with the colonial outlook that the only athletic endeavor worth attempting is one which is endorsed by the ‘other’ or looks good on tv. i am impressed with photos in flickr from akhadas or kushti or malkhamb or buffalo racing or the snake boat race that reflect indigenous sport. It shows in the taut physiques and the ropy muscles. there is much going on in the local fairgrounds, but there is not yet have a medium to share the story with the masses, if it all gets swamped out in the televized sport.
Chennai has a gymkhana club.
I don’t know anything about the Ivy League schools, but really – I find it quite good that universities in North America/Europe actually look at or give a damn about those “nebulous” criteria such as leadership or athleticism or community involvement or volunteering. If the goal is to just train another worker bee then by all means go ahead and base it on an entrance score. But if you want to develop a positive productive leader for the future, then you better cultivate all those soft skills. You know that entire hullabaloo about the “Asian Tigers” (a product of chinese/indian education in the realm of engineering and the sciences) coming to take over all the jobs and leading the way in the future – I don’t buy that for a minute. None of the professionals I’ve talked take them seriously at all since they are by nature one-dimensional creatures. They are phenomenal as number crunchers or for grunt work (I don’t mean physical), but aside from that they have sub-par team skills, communication, leadership abilities etc. It seems almost comical that at the end of the day we’ll just harness their efforts by being their managers, present their ideas and get the kudos, while getting paid more than them.
I do agree with crimson. Another good thing about those “nebulous” criterion is that you have the prospect to use variety of talents to enter a university and not just working hard for academic achievement. For example if a teenager in India screws up his/her college entrance exam (s)he is screwed unless his/her parents have money.
But then if someone is really academically talented then higher education in India is cheaper in elite institutions as tuition is highly subsidized unlike Ivy leagues in US. And the students of these elite institutions are definitely not 1-dimensional.
Ouch. I was talking Australia – not India / Asia. Try working in China for a few years and let me know if your chinese colleagues believe that you have superior communication skills in Mandarin.
No one is coming to take your jobs – although many are coming to take your money – RIP 🙂
This link may be of help to those who think that all leadership skills emanates from one part of the world
Finally there we found a way by which Indians will be able to get into Ivy League schools. Otherwise, who would have thought! 🙂
I am not sure I agree (although I don’t want to get into an unproductive discussion on which system is more exclusionary). Males from big urban areas are disproportionately represented at the IITs, and this is certainly correlated with the encouragement given to men as well as the high quality coaching available in these areas. State engineering colleges are better, but the quality of education available drops off pretty steeply past the top 2 or 3 in a state. As for private engineering colleges, an ability to pay the hefty (de)capitation fees is beneficial, if not necessary.
As for kuchiyapudi, I believe that is the world’s oldest dance. And I will preempt melbourne desi by asking, does squash get you laid?
I’m kind of a big deal in the world of pickleball. Will this help me get into Harvard?
To me, i read it as this guy being an American Indian who was asked to play for India. What makes you think he grew up playing squash in India?
Up thread someone mentioned a gymkhana in Chennia. Yes and there are twelve million peeps in the city. I wouldn’t consider any “gymkhana” sport “popular” Ever tried getting into the Bombay Gym? Ergo, I wouldn’t discount shmoozing between rich south mumbayites and american consulate employees as the reason that keeps the supply of desi squash players to ivy leagues steady. Also, don’t alumni influence ivy leagues admissions? So, perhaps at some point there was, by coincidence, a rich south mumbaiite who was good at squash and therein lies a story…
If you read the whole bio you’ll see that he’s an Indian who learned to play squash in India:
ok. Correction taken.
Rahul (#42), I agree with almost everything you say, and that’s why I added the qualifier ‘in some ways’. My point was that a simple entrance exam with objective grading criteria is fairer to underprivileged kids than a complicated subjective procedure to judge ‘well-roundedness’. Well-roundedness the way it is usually measured, is more a function of where you were born and your parents’ SES, and says little about the person’s intrinsic intelligence. This is certainly true in India (can’t say about the US).
I am totally with you on coaching institutes: the distort things quite a bit, and they have reached ridiculous proportions now. I was amazed to see posters in Hyderabad a few months ago advertising coaching institutes for entrance to companies such as infy, wipro and satyam.
The current men’s NCAA tennis champion is a lad from chennai.. This is much more impressive than the squash players..
Cavalier junior Somdev Devvarman (Chennai, India) became the first men’s tennis player in ACC history to win an NCAA Singles Championship, downing Georgia’s John Isner in the final Monday night at the Dan Magill Tennis Complex. In one of the most dramatic finals in the 123-year history of the tournament, Devvarman scored a 7-6 (7), 4-6, 7-6 (2) win over the tournament’s No. 1 seed.
I have a feeling indians, owing to their sense of decency and clean play, and due to their natural physical advantage, will excel in some sports more than others.
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