Binns of the Tousled Hair Teams with 'The Great One' To Create a Kick-Ass Site

Peter Nicol, he of everlasting squash glory, has teamed up with the good-natured and chronically tousle-haired Jethro Binns to launch SquashSkills.com. There is every indication that this site will leap right to the top of your internet viewing list, so get your bookmark button ready. 

This is in fact a relaunch. The earlier site was already good, but there was not enough to keep the Squashist's interest, which is at times as focused as that of a hyperkinetic, diarrhetic flea. So a high bar indeed .... 

But this relaunch will have a library of over 100 videos, with a new one added daily! This quotidian blast of squashy goodness will make a terrific impression on squash browsers the world over. Other squash luminaries will appear on the site as well. 

Indeed, I offer this prediction: This site will fundamentally reset the internet expectations of the squash-loving public -- it's a game changer! Other sites will have to step up or risk becoming obsolete.

Here's their site: bookmark this if you haven't already done so.

Good luck to them!

What a Mouthful!

I'm on record as saying that the DailySquashReport.com site is a nice addition to the squash world's relatively paltry offerings for news. I make it a point to visit "the Report" after first checking out SquashSite. I definitely recommend lovers of squash bookmark both sites....

The Report does, however, have its quirks. The daily news is posted in the morning, so anything newsworthy that happens during the day will not appear until the next morning. So when Willstrop won the Punj Lloyd PSA Masters tournament, and thereby ascended to #1 player in the world rankings, there was nothing on the Report's site until the next day. But okay, fair enough, I'm sure the folks putting the Report out have other things to do during the day, and aren't sitting around a desk waiting for squash news to come drifting in. 

Another quirky thing about the site is the writing of Rob Dinerman. I've never met the man, but having read his articles over the years you can draw a few firm conclusions: he is a hardball fanatic, is not a fan of US Squash (probably because of its embrace of softball), and is not a fan of the common period.

He writes enthusiastic reviews of professional doubles tournaments, in particular those played under the ISDA banner. He also recently picked what he considered the most important squash performances of 2011 in an article he wrote for his site, and of the 8 players highlighted, 5 were squash hardballers -- a disproportionate number, surely. But again, to each his own. If the Report wants to be mainly a venue for original articles about squash doubles, that's fine, although certainly limiting.

But of enduring interest is what appears to be Mr. Dinerman's antipathy towards the period -- a/k/a the full stop. He doesn't seem to like them, sometimes going to seemingly extreme lengths to avoid their use. Here is a wonderful example, from his recent article about the ISDA tour:

When Manek Mathur and Yvain Badan posted sequential victories over first Damien Mudge and Ben Gould (rupturing their 46-0 skein) and then Matt Jenson and Clive Leach, the top two ranked teams on the ISDA tour, in the final two rounds of the Briggs Cup, the last and most lucrative pro hardball doubles tournament in calendar 2011, they completely upended the prevailing status quo, generated the most noteworthy accomplishment in the nearly nine years since Leach and Blair Horler dethroned reigning champs Mudge and Gary Waite in the final of the April 2003 Kellner Cup (on a daring Horler reverse-corner at 14-13 in the fifth), became the first team in the 12-year history of the ISDA to win a tournament in which they faced match-point-against in the third game of their semi and culminated a meteoric ascent from having to hack their way through the qualifying rounds as recently as this past January to winning an event of this magnitude less than a year later.

When I first read this paragraph I searched desperately for a period, but only at the very end of the paragraph, spent and exhausted, did I find one.

It's clearly Dinerman's writing style, which he has honed over many years. I am a writer and an editor, and frankly I wouldn't write that paragraph that way, but clearly Mr. Dinerman is just exercising his own artistic license, and I'm all for artistry. 

I was curious, though. There are ways of judging the difficulty in a written sample, and it has become something of a science. I am occasionally called on to write at a 6th grade level, for example, because I need to convey in layman's terms rather complicated things about medicine that need explaining, but big words cannot be used. Well, there is a site for figuring out grade-level reading abilities. WordsCount analyzes text through various means and can estimate the level of education one must have in order to understand it. So by copying the above sentence-paragraph into the readability calculator, I was able to get an approximation of the grade level one would need to understand the text. 

The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level was 65. 

Not 6th grade, but 65th grade. What the hell is that, anyway?

No It's Not, It's DEAD!

Because of the woeful inadequacies of the Google search engine, which are multiple yet obscure, I have noticed that I am receiving a lot of clicks on a blog I wrote last January about SquashZAG being up and running. I called it "It's Alive!" 

Unfortunately, soon after I posted that blog the site's owners apparently gave up on the site and it has lain fallow ever since. So no, it's not alive, and this time it is most assuredly dead. Stick a fork in it, it's done. It's time to de-bookmark it.

There, Google, stick that in your search engine!

Web Round-Up

It's great when new internet sites about squash crop up, and I try to troll around the web from time to time trying to find the latest stuff. 

I recently got an email from a new site called Squash Hero, an admirable effort whose principal goal is to give those interested in purchasing a racket a variety of statistics on rackets and then try to identify the cheapest internet source. The site also has a section on squash tips, which are taken from other sources and amalgamated on their site. 

The breakdown of racket specifications on Squash Hero is a good service. It provides specific data about each racket that would otherwise require a lot of searching to get together in one place: it reviews weight (and whether it is appropriate for beginners or doubles play), head size, head-heavy balance (being the distance between the midpoint of the racket's length and the center of its mass), and string density (which they calculate as number of mains x number of crosses/racket head area). The site then notes the lowest price they have found for the racket. When you click on the racket's image, you get additional information, such as beam width, type of stringing, and type of grip. 


Obviously, the principal benefit for the squash player is being able to quickly go to the squash internet store that offers the cheapest price, and generally speaking the site does indeed offer up the cheapest I could find. But they are not flawless. I looked up the Wilson Hyper Sledge Hammer 120G: Squash Hero finds the lowest price on Amazon for $149, but my favorite squash store is Squash Gear, and they list the racket for $139. 


The site takes a little getting used to. You can sort your racket selection by manufacturer, weight, head size, or cost, all of which is great. But it takes some diddling to really get the feel for how the system works. Overall, though, I'd say it is worth it. It would be nice if they populated the site with additional squash tips, news, photos, etc. We'll see. 


A great site that is absolutely not to be missed is No Let!, a video review of squash play with very interesting commentary. I'm not sure who is responsible for this blog; there doesn't seem to be any attribution for it on the site. But whoever is doing the commentary knows his stuff, and I highly recommend this site and encourage whoever you are to keep at it!


Another blog you should definitely bookmark is Racquetsphere, by squash's very own James Zug. He covers not only squash but also the more rarefied sports of racquets and court tennis, which are worth reading up on. Racquets really is the mother sport to squash, and court tennis is the mother sport of tennis. Both are minuscule peculiarities in the world of sport nowadays, but I can vouch for the fact that court tennis is a lot of fun, and I can also aver that I haven't the cohones to venture onto a racquets court, for fear of getting killed by its golfball-like ball that ricochets around the court at nearly 200 mph. Zug gets around in the world of all three sports and has interesting observations and anecdotes about all three.

It's Alive!

The original posting has been removed because the blog was about a squash site that no longer exists. 

Please check out the latest postings here: The Squashist

Kvetches

Sad to report, but SquashZAG really is down and out. There are a few additional last-minute postings on the site, but I can confirm that the site is truly shutting down. This is another blow to what could and should be a vibrant online community of squash enthusiasts, but for that to happen we really need more sites like SquashZAG. The ZAG was a very good site, and had a lot of offerings that kept people coming back to it daily. But to do that consistently, these sites need support. 

I've already kvetched about SquashTalk.com, and I notice today that this site is once again on hiatus, not having posted any news since Aug. 19. But I can sympathize, because that site suffers from the same thing the ZAG suffered from, and that is minimal staffing (which is a nice way to say, only 1 person) and minimal support from squash companies. 

There is still SquashSite.co.uk, a very nice site and the squash world's leader, but I would like to see some diversity out there. When the Olympic Committee, filled with money-obsessed nincompoops, analyzes the sport of squash and sees only one decent squash site, what does that say? To them it says, Let's move on, shall we?

I would love to see an English-language site from some foreign squash power, like the Australians, or even the Egyptians, since many of their squash players know English. But the most likely source of another site would likely be the US. Hell, didn't we invent the damn internet? Can't some slightly wealthy (that rules me out, sorry!) squash enthusiast bankroll a site that forces the squash firms to take notice? Or what about Squash Magazine, the minimally updated website for the print publication of the same name? The printed magazine is one of the benefits of membership in US Squash (now nicknamed USQ to the cognoscenti), but knowing what I know about the high cost of printing and distribution, couldn't this publication do more and better by focusing on the web, while ditching the printed publication, or perhaps publishing only an annual for the benefit of USQ members? Dunno, I'm just kvetching, but that smells like an opportunity to me.

ZAG Down

Don't know why, but SquashZAG is down again. I hope it's nothing permanent. We need good squash sites on the web!

On Mediocrity

I just got back from a conference on custom content, a term that encompasses a lot but implies editorial or other 'content' that is created specifically for a sponsoring company. An example would be a magazine paid for by a pharmaceutical company that has a series of (hopefully informative) articles and, oh by the way, some of those articles refer to the company's products. It's a type of marketing that seeks to engage the consumer more enthusiastically than a simple ad could ever do. 

There are a variety of custom media nowadays, and many of the speakers spent considerable time opining on the benefits of using social media like Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere as part of a custom media marketing plan. The point was also made over and over again that we are living in a world where the sheer volume of information about everything under the sun has multiplied algorithmically, and will continue to do so. 

In fact, one opinion leader sagely decreed that nowadays 'everybody is a publisher,' with the profusion of blogs and tweets and chats and ramblings threatening to clog up the internet. Someone in the audience wisely asked, 'If that's so, what is the effect of all this 'content' -- some of it is not going to be any good, so how do we know the difference?' The speaker's answer surprised and pissed me off. He said that although the content on the web varies in ability, it is by definition 'just good enough', and maintained that big media companies aren't looking nowadays so much for quality writing (he cited The New Yorker) as they are looking for opportunities for engagement. It doesn't so much matter if the writer's grammar is dodgy so much as it is lively and engaging.

This conversation reminded me of my war against the word 'content,' which I have most emphatically lost. Early on in the advent of the internet people started calling the editorial that was to be found on their site 'content.' The word 'content' is such a nondescriptive, throwaway word for what should hopefully be editorial that is thoughtful, well-crafted, and artfully presented. 'Content', for me, an editor, was a disgraceful put-down. It sought to make the medium—the internet itself—more important than the message to be found in the words themselves. 

So now I go to a meeting and listen to a thought leader who admits, yeah, 'content' can be pretty bad, but big media doesn't care that much. Here's an example from the squash world of lousy content—editorial that deserves the damning sobriquet 'content.'

What does this have to do with squash? Well, not much, but the internet's insatiable thirst for whatever it can get to fill its trillion pages is a recipe for mediocrity. I'm happy to say I haven't met too many squash players who are mediocre people, I've always found something special about the people who play this game. We are all editorial people, not 'content' people. Thank heaven for that!  

Wake Up, Man!

SquashTalk.com was an early presence of squash news and commentary on the web, and for that it should be praised. It is also a one-man show, so generous leeway should be extended when evaluating its convoluted layout and sluggish frequency of updates. But when the last update to be found on SquashTalk is nearly 20 days old, the response is just to shake your head and walk away. 

The U.S. is the country where much of the forward progress of squash is happening right now, so for SquashTalk to be the principal source of web-based news from the US is, at this point, embarrassing. Those interested in what's happening in squash have two main choices: www.squashsite.co.uk, the leader in information about squash, and www.squashzag.com, the top aggregator of squash commentary. In the U.S., one should also check out the US Squash site, both for its association news but also its links to World Squash News and player blogs. 

But someone out there, some U.S.-based, aggressive, web-savvy, squashist techie, should put some energy into creating a web presence for US squash players we can be proud of. C'mon, man!