Happy New Year from the Michigan Squash Team!
This edition is brought to you by our team’s other Co-President, Jeremy Waldman. It was about time we gave Lou a break.
We hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year’s celebration. While our football team took a tough loss yesterday, the Michigan Squash Team certainly had a great end to 2021 with the CSA ranking us as the #1 club team in the country, and #32 overall!
Our #32 ranking is the highest in our team history, and we’re excited to keep practicing hard and move even further up the rankings. We’ve had other teams take notice of our recent success as well. The University of Chicago squash team has reached out to us with some friendly banter ahead of an upcoming tournament in Chicago, which we’ll further talk about at the end of the newsletter.
In even more exciting news, we have an amazing fundraising announcement. Jai Shekhawat, father of our team and exec member Gaurav Shekhawat, has very generously offered to match any donations up to $10,000! We can’t thank Jai enough for this incredible opportunity. We’ve already received a few donations from team supporters which will be helpful in funding our upcoming tournaments over the next two months. As a reminder, if you are interested in donating to the team, you can send a check to this address:
Michigan Club Squash 911 Sybil St. Ann Arbor, MI 48104
In addition, in case anyone missed our previous email, here is a link to our fundraising pitch deck which highlights our accomplishments over the past few seasons and team goals going forward. Michigan Squash Fundraising Proposal.pdf
We know everyone has been curious about when Michigan squash gear would be available for purchase. Well the wait is over! We’re excited to announce that the Michigan squash pop up shop will launch on January 4th. We will send another email with more details in a few days. Thanks so much to Gaurav for working hard with the printing store to make this happen.
We also want to give an update on our current plans for events in January. On January 9th, we are planning on making a trip to the Detroit Athletic Center to play with the club’s members. This event will be a great opportunity for the team to get more practice against experienced players, as well as inform the DAC members about the squash team’s efforts to gain more recognition from the University. Following that trip, we are heading back to Detroit the very next day to work with Racquet Up. Racquet Up Detroit is an organization that offers a fantastic mentoring program for Detroit youth that focuses on giving students education, health, and character development to help prepare for college. One major aspect of this program is learning to play squash, and the Michigan Squash Team is excited to volunteer and play squash with Racquet Up students.
Finally, at the end of January, our team is playing in a tournament in Chicago from January 22-24. While all details have not been finalized, it looks like some of the participating teams include Northeastern, Northwestern, Stanford, WashU, and Arizona State. In other words, there will be lots of challenging competition for us.
That’s all for this month’s newsletter. In the next edition we’ll give more details about the Club Team Championships in February and our first ever home match hosted by the DAC (sneak peak: it’ll be against Notre Dame on February 6th!).
We hope you enjoyed reading through all of these exciting updates and we wish you a fantastic start to 2022!
Best,
Jeremy Waldman ‘22
Co-President