New York’s elite squash clubs in row over ‘snobbish’ dress code
One player takes on the University Club on Fifth Avenue,
which still requires members to wear white
By the time the new season began last month, Poveromo was the captain of a team that was preparing for a fixture against the University Club, a private establishment on Fifth Avenue. “Someone said: ‘Oh, by the way, there’s a dress code,’” he said. You could only play in white. He was astonished. He said: “I just felt like: ‘Why is this still the rule here?’”
The New York Squash league, in which Open Squash and the University Club both field teams, has a mission “to open up access”, said Poveromo, 33, who works for a bubble tea company. He knew several exclusive clubs in New York still required their members to wear white, but they no longer make the demand of visiting players.
Only the University Club was seeking to uphold this standard for all. Poveromo felt it was wrong. “There are people on different income levels,” he said. “You are having to go buy clothes just to play at someone else’s club.”
He acknowledges that one club’s squash dress code is not necessarily the most pressing issue facing mankind. Discussing it with friends who do not play squash, days before the 2024 election, “they were like: ‘So that’s what’s keeping you up at night?’” he said.
Friends who did play squash were more understanding. “Squash has never been more diverse,” said another team captain. “That’s why this is coming up.” Another player felt it was a case of the new clubs “rubbing up against the snooty ‘all whites’, in both senses”.
Trevor Laing, 26, at StreetSquash in the Harlem neighbourhood of New York
Poveromo wrote an email to the league, complaining about the University Club’s dress code.
So far, the league appears unmoved. Joanne Schickerling, the league’s president, said it had “no official stance” on dress codes. “I can’t control how private clubs run their dress codes,” she said.
Schicklerling hails from South Africa where, as a teenager, she was a top ten tennis and squash player. She attended Indiana State University on a tennis scholarship. Besides serving as president of the league, she is now the director of StreetSquash, an organisation in Harlem that offers children in local schools, from the age of eleven, after-school squash and tutoring programmes, designed to ensure that they finish high school and are prepared for college.
Amar Moorer, 29, an alumnus of the programme who is now a software developer, was playing a league game there one evening this week. He first heard of squash when he was twelve and someone from StreetSquash came to his school. “Like everyone else, I thought it was a vegetable,” he said. Squash took him to Italy and around the country. In New York “I have been to the Harvard Club, the Yale Club,” he said. “I get to go and meet new people and chat, break out of my shell.”
The squash craze has spread across New York
In an office overlooking the courts, Stefany Navarro, the chief program officer at StreetSquash, said that she too had been into the Harvard Club. “We are in a different world,” she said. “Even the aesthetic of our building, as you can see — everything is very open.”
Peter Nicol, 51, who was world’s No 1 squash player for five years, had the same aim with Nicol Squash, the club he founded on 42nd Street with his wife Jess. “Street frontage, glass, music pumping,” he said. “If we want the sport to properly succeed [in America] it has to do what kind of happened in the Seventies and Eighties in England.”
In England, a charismatic squash player named Jonah Barrington popularised the game “and suddenly there were squash clubs popping up all over the UK”, including in the little town of Inverurie, near Aberdeen, where Nicol grew up. The boom faded. But he thinks squash might grow in the same way in the US, helped by the craze for pickleball. “It’s opened up this huge opportunity for all racket sports, to democratise and open up and have more facilities at a slightly lower price point,” he said. “So that it’s accessible to almost everyone.”
The University Club does not have a glass frontage or pumping music. It looks like a Florentine palace. “You can’t even walk through the front door without a blazer,” Poveromo said. But when he arrived, one recent evening for his match, he was able to enter via a side door, through the club’s gymnasium. There’s a swimming pool there, for men only, that has the loosest dress code of anywhere in the club. You don’t even need trunks. Many bathers do their laps in the nude.
Poveromo took a lift up to the tenth floor, where there’s an expansive wood-panelled locker room, tables for after-game drinks and a balcony overlooking the glimmering towers of midtown. He had ordered some white shirts and shorts online, but one of his team mates had still managed to forget their shirt. In the locker room, an opposing player said: “Oh no, you can’t wear that,” he said. But they managed to find him a white shirt he could borrow. “Honestly the people were really lovely,” he said. “They were very hospitable.”
The club itself maintained a sphinx-like silence on the great whites debate. Reached for comment, an official explained politely that it does not respond to press inquiries.
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