Greetings again from the Michigan Club Squash Team!
Happy July and welcome to the third edition of the Michigan Squash Newsletter. Please enjoy this video our Social Chair, Conor Hynes, made to introduce all of our players above.
We are especially excited to kick off this month’s newsletter by announcing that our website has officially launched! Entirely coded by our very own founder, Ryan Kish, the website will be a place to learn about our players, read past blog posts, fill out recruiting surveys, view team pictures, and more. A huge thank you to Ryan for working so hard on this and an additional shoutout to our Social Media Manager, Alyson Chatterjee, for editing all of the content on each page.
With a website built and a team ready to play, all we need now is a season. While we are still waiting on more information from the College Squash Association and the University, we continue to plan our schedule with the mindset that we will be playing a full season. So far, we are scheduled to defend our Big 10 Championship title in Chicago, IL this November and to play in the Jester Cup in Baltimore, MD in January, 2021. Additionally, we intend to make a reappearance at the National Team Championships in February or March. Finally, we have plans in the works to host our first tournament ever at the Detroit Athletic Center (DAC) against teams like OSU, Northwestern, and Denison University.
In response to the Black Lives Matter protests going on around the globe, our team decided to have a Zoom dialogue on racism and social identities to address these pertinent issues and to do our part in contributing to an anti-racist future. Social Media Manager and activist, Alyson Chatterjee, put together a presentation on race, intersectionality, and social identities, drawing on her experiences with Michigan’s Intergroup Relations program and intersectional feminist studies. The presentation was followed by an open dialogue about social identities and experiences with race as well as resources for moving forward, including books to read, movies to watch, places to donate, and information on how to have difficult conversations about race with family members. While Michigan Club Squash knows that this is still not enough, we are working as a team to unlearn the white supremacist ideologies that are embedded in society and to embrace an anti-racist framework in every corner of our lives.
Later on in the month, some of our team members and I led a virtual workout for the squash team at The Hill School (the high school I attended in Pottstown, PA), which was followed by a Q&A session about college squash, Michigan, and more. The workout doubled as a fundraiser in which we raised money for the Squash in America DEI Endowment. It was a great way to gather as a team, get kids interested in college squash and our program, and to raise money for an organization which promotes diversity and inclusion in the sport we love.
That’s it for this month’s newsletter! Next month’s update will hopefully include more information on the tournament at the DAC, some player bios, and the eagerly awaited update from the University on student org participation in the fall.
Thank you for reading, and stay safe and healthy.
Sincerely,
Lou Alpert ‘22
Co-President