Squash in the Hamptons at the Elmaleh-Stanton Squash Center
Please note the squash courts will be closed this coming Saturday February 4th, 2012 for Squash Tournaments:
Hamptons Junior Bronze & Hamptons Open
START TIMES are available from ussquash.com tournament schedule and from the squash office.
In the Press...
Wally Glennon Spearheads Public Concept in Squash on Long Island
July 14, 2004, By Rob Dinerman; SquashTalk Independent News Service © 2004
As the result of the vision and dedicated efforts of a band of motivated squash enthusiasts, it appears that for the first time ever that the East End of Long Island will have publicly accessible squash courts.
The group, headed by Wally Glennon, a longtime member of the Union Club in New York, plans to construct four singles courts and one doubles court as part of a major wing that will be added to the Southampton Town Recreation Center, which operates under the aegis of the Board of Southampton Youth
Services, Inc.
As currently constituted, the Recreation Center contains several regulation basketball courts, an indoor track, a fitness room and men's and women's locker rooms, etc.
In addition to the squash courts, the proposed expansion would enlarge the fitness room, create a "gymboree" room for children and install an outdoor covered swimming pool. The five total squash courts would occupy 7,000 of the total 15,000-foot expansion, with a wide walkway in between the two pairs of adjacent singles courts and plenty of room for viewing behind the glass back walls.
The hope and expectation is that the substantial weekender and second-home-owner community will represent the significant nucleus of the squash-playing
membership, at least initially. Mr. Glennon himself falls into this category, as does his committee co-chair Brian Brady, whose architectural firm Brady Design, Inc. has produced the floor plans, and most of the rest of the committee members as well. They have already raised nearly 50% of the $500,000 needed to go forward with the project, the ground-breaking ceremony for which, Mr. Glennon hopes, will likely take place this autumn. Virtually the entire committee is composed of members of Manhattan clubs whose weekends and summer vacations in the Hamptons, enjoyable as they are in other ways, are not complete without the opportunity to play the game they have come to love.
But adults will not be the only beneficiaries of this court construction. Indeed one of the major reasons for the full support the project has received from Southampton Youth Services is the planned initiation shortly after the court construction is completed of a full-service junior program, which will provide a daily physical education alternative to the local public and private schools in the area. Also envisioned within the first few years is the establishment of the kind of squash-centered youth-mentoring programs modeled along the Squashbusters, Citysquash, Street Squash and Squash Smarts organizations that have proven so successful in Boston, New York and Philadelphia during the past half-dozen years.
Squash has proven an excellent fit for children and teenagers given the considerable health and conditioning benefits that can be gained in a relatively short time period and the sportsmanship and comraderie it generates; this has been recognized recently by the Forbes Magazine study this past spring that ranked squash No. 1 in its "Ten Healthiest Sports" listing.
Junior Squash Tournament Draws Top Talent To Growing Squash Community
By Brett Mauser / Hamptons.com
Girls under-17 competitor Roxana Mead rips a forehand as opponent Peter Ansour sizes up his target in the boys Under 11
Katherine Elliot-Moskwa awaits the carom off the front wall.
Southampton - The word has spread around the country and the world - the Elmaleh-Stanton Squash Center at the Southampton Town Recreation Center is one of the top facilities in all of the United States. As has been the case since the five-court venue opened last summer, the quality of play at last weekend's Sotheby's International Realty Second Annual Hamptons Junior Open Gold Squash Championships certainly proved to be up to par as well.
"Throughout the year, we've had a growing number of kids and adults come in," said SYS Program Director Joy Pariz. "We've had a lot of people who played racquetball and tennis come and try it. We've also had some kids that started playing in the fall when we started having clinics, and they're still playing now and have gotten better and better."
Part of the sport's attractiveness, particularly for kids and teenagers, is its growth at the college level. Ivy League schools such as Princeton, Yale and Harvard ranked among the top five in the College Squash Association's final team rankings in March; club teams at larger institutions like North Carolina and Notre Dame were highly touted in the CSA's Emerging Team Division. As the game continues to build momentum, more scholarship opportunities, in addition to those already in place at several schools, are likely to sprout up. Squash has experienced a boom since the Elmaleh-Stanton Squash Center, widely regarded as one of the country's top squash venues, opened for business in June 2007. That it isn't completely unrelated to more popular sports has made for an easy transition for some.
"They can grow up through the sport, play in college and have an opportunity for a great education," Pariz said. "We're hoping to encourage local kids to start doing that. You can't guarantee anything, but there's always that hope."
Interest isn't limited to adolescents either, according to Glennon. From a pure sport sense, the squash head has gained some colleagues who have transformed from novice to obsessed in no time. He marveled as he told the story of Jim Kennedy, 70, a beginner as early as last year who now makes daily stops at the squash center.
"We have many year-round players - contractors and landscapers, doctors and lawyers, architects, they come in to play all the time," he said.
"We all want to see the game flourish," Glennon said. "My satisfaction is when I see the local people, of all ages, embrace it like they are doing with their friends and families to enjoy the community of squash"
Junior And Doubles Champs Crowned During Week Of Elite Squash Competition At SYS
By Brett Mauser / Hamptons.com
Chris Wilkinson of New York City came out on top in the 3rd Annual Under-19 champion Camille Lanier whips a backhand along the
Sotheby's Realty Hamptons Junior Open. back wall during her semifinal showdown against Katherine
Moskwa-Elliott.
Southampton - The Elmaleh-Stanton Squash Center at the Southampton Town Recreation Center has quickly become one of the sport's premier facilities in the United States. Further evidence of the venue's upward movement came when it held both the 3rd Annual Sotheby's Realty Hamptons Junior Open as well as the inaugural US Squash Under-25 Hardball Doubles National Championship.
Greg MacArthur winds up and smashes a forehand during the doubles final.
The doubles tournament was organized by Gary Waite, the founder of the International Squash Doubles Association who as an 11-time winner of the prestigious North American Open is widely regarded as the greatest doubles player in the sport's history. The finalists both breezed through the qualifying rounds as neither surrendered a game until the semifinals. Todd Ruth and Trevor McGuinness took the first game but dropped the next 15-14 to opponents Graham Bassett and Greg MacArthur. The tandem, which attended the same middle school in Philadelphia before branching off, hung tough to win the third game 15-11 and secured the win by taking the fourth by a 15-8 count.
Sayed Salim, Todd Ruth, Trevor McGuiness, Jim Stanton, Gary Waite, Victor Elmaleh, Graham Basset, Greg McArthur, Wally Glennon.
VANITY FAIR MAGAZINE
April 22, 2009
By Alex Beam
There can be only one Victor in Squash....or can there be two..??
“Victor” in squash ineluctably refers to Victor Niederhoffer, one of the best American players of the late 20th century—and certainly the most talked-about. But the American game boasts another famous Victor, Victor Elmaleh, a successful Moroccan-born architect, real estate developer, artist, and patron of the arts who also happens to be nuts for squash. He started playing the game at age 33 at the City Athletic Club, and now, at age 90, he’s still swinging away.
Elmaleh treated me to a delightful lunch in the 18th floor aerie of World-Wide Holdings, the real estate firm he founded with his late partner—real estate partner, that is—Frank Stanton. (Not the former president of CBS.) Works by Picasso, Leger, Miro, and Elmaleh decorate the walls. I liked Elmaleh’s miniature watercolors, and so did a critic from the New York Post, who called them ”lush, elegant, fluid, abstract, mysterious and untitled.”
Elmaleh has enjoyed many squash triumphs, but none greater than his legendary 1968 national doubles championship, with the Other Victor as his partner. Elmaleh knew Niederhoffer’s father at Brooklyn College, and heard plenty about the son’s legendary record at Harvard. “I was 49 and he was 23,” Elmaleh recalls. “He played the left wall, and I played the right wall. I couldn’t cover as much of the court, but I would make most of the points. He would run everything down. Almost every match went five games. We beat people we had no business beating.”
Here’s how Jim Zug decribes their technique in Squash: A History of the Game: “Niederhoffer placed Elmaleh in front of the red line on the right side, told him not to worry about any balls that flew past him and proceeded to scamper around the court like a scared rabbit.” The older Elmaleh chugged orange juice to stay hydrated, Zug reports, while “Niederhoffer covered 75 percent of the court.”
It worked. They won.
Elmaleh on the 18th floor aerie of World-Wide Holdings
Describing the famously volatile Niederhoffer, Elmaleh chooses his words carefully. “I know him as well as anybody,” he says. “He’s one of a kind, an eccentric. He is a very difficult man. He wasn’t an elegant player, but he was very able. He was a winner. He was a terrific tactician who really studied the game.”
Astonishingly, Elmaleh won a championship while in his 80s, teaming up with Gary Waite to win the Casino Heights Pro-Am tournament in 2001. He has lost some mobility (“My legs are gone”), but still plays with U.S. Squash C.E.O. Kevin Klipstein, in a game of their own invention: They play exclusively along the right wall of an international court, with a hardball doubles ball. Drop shots are forbidden. “He usually lives up to his name,” Klipstein wrote in Squash magazine.
“I win more than I lose,” says Elmaleh, no slave to false modesty. During our conversation, he let slip that he once beat the Pakistani champion Hashim Khan, although he allows that, at the time, Khan was still getting used to the American hardball game.
Elmaleh has done a lot and built a lot, perhaps most notably the Cesar Pelli-designed Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. But I’m most impressed by the Elmaleh-Stanton Squash Center at the Southampton Recreation Center, founded by a $150,000 donation from the two partners. The Center has four singles courts, and one court for Elmaleh’s beloved doubles game, which he fears is falling out of fashion, especially with young people. You can walk in with a partner and play squash for $20; I can’t do that anywhere near where I live in Massachusetts.
And you don’t have to bootlick the stiffs on the Membership Committee! That is my idea of paradise.
