Greetings again from the Michigan Club Squash Team!
We would like to start off by thanking all of you who signed petitions and called your representatives to keep international students, including some our players, in the U.S. this year. Sometimes it feels like our voices are powerless, but we are often reminded of the power of coming together to create serious change. About 10 days ago, ICE officially dropped its policy that would have forced international students to take in-person classes or go home. We could not be more relieved.
Unfortunately, we still do not have news on whether we will be able to play squash this fall. We are also waiting on decisions from the College Squash Association. Of course, our primary concern is the health and safety of our players and we will not take any unnecessary risks. In the worst case scenario, we believe we will be playing in the winter of 2021.
In the meantime, the squash team has been busy holding a fitness challenge! Social Chair, Conor Hynes, set us up on a platform called ChallengeHound where we have all been manually entering in our workouts. The website tracks all sorts of cool metrics including elevation, distance, consistency, and dedication. Some highlights include Alyson Chatterjee with 120 miles covered, Andrew Garver with 2,536 feet of elevation climbed, Anourag Shah with 22 activities registered, and Akshat Mantri with 31 hours of exercise logged! In the “trying his best” category, Akik and Yajvin have both logged 2 exercises each for a combined 1.5 hours of exercise, and in the “are they still alive?” category we have Ducminh and Gaurav with a total of 0 exercises logged. Boys, if you’re reading this please text one of us.
Best of all, many of our players have recently started returning to the courts. While there is quite a bit of rust to knock off, everyone agrees that it feels great to be back.
That’s it for this month. Sometime in the next month, we will finally obtain some kind of decision from the University on student org participation in the fall. At that time, we will make sure to update you.
Thank you for reading, and stay safe and healthy.
Sincerely,
Lou Alpert ‘22
Co-President