Wearing clear safety goggles, his hair tied in a ponytail atop his head, a teenager practiced hitting a small black ball against the wall in front of him.

The ball created a steady three-count rhythm as it moved from the player’s racket to the wall to the floor and back again. In the room next door, more than a dozen students chatted before heading outside to play kickball.

The walls of Portland Community Squash, a multi-generational community center in Portland’s Oakdale neighborhood, are covered with pictures of the students who play there and facts about them, such as where they were born, when they moved to Portland, and their dream college.

• Born in Djibouti, moved to Portland at 7 years old, Yale University
• Born in Iraq and raised in Portland, Harvard University
• Born in Portland, raised in Munjoy Hill, Bates College

Portland Community Squash is raising $6 million to increase the number of courts from four to seven and build a café and add more community spaces, all with the goal of growing its roster of services, encouraging people to spend more time there and strengthening community cohesion. Four million dollars has already been raised for the expansion, largely from individual donors. 

It is more a holistic family community center than a sports facility. It provides tutoring, mentoring and wellness classes, runs a summer camp and holds community events. Although certain programs are open only to students, membership is open to people of all ages.

Gayl Anglin’s son Matthew Okulski has been playing at Portland Community Squash for five years. Anglin and the rest of her family don’t play squash, but they’re members anyway. They use the fitness equipment and attend community events. 

Anglin said her son spends hours a day at Portland Community Squash – practicing, doing homework and spending time with friends.

“It’s not really just a squash program, it’s more of a personal development program,” she said.  

Her family’s experience underscores the expansion campaign motto: “The kids call us their second home, let’s make it a second home for the whole family.” 

A DIFFERENT VISION FOR SQUASH

The current executive director and one of the founders, Barrett Takesian, laid out his vision for the upstart community center 10 years ago, scratching out his ideas on a legal pad with crude drawings of squash courts and notes neatly written in pencil. An insurance professional, Takesian had been volunteering with youth groups and realized he wanted to focus more of his attention on youth development.

The program quickly moved from an idea on paper to the local YMCA and later to a retrofitted synagogue. Along the way, it challenged preconceptions of the game.

Squash has historically been a sport of the elite. It was invented in England and first popped up in the United States in boarding schools before moving to private city clubs. But Portland Community Squash renounces the exclusive bubble surrounding the sport. Portland Community Squash is for everyone. 

The program annually serves 200 students in grades three through 12 and 225 additional people through family memberships. Of the students, 67 percent are people of color, 63 percent are low-income, 27 percent are immigrants and refugees, 56 percent are multi-lingual and 60 percent are aiming to be the first in their family to go to college.  

The program comes at no cost to those at or below the median state income – $51,435 for a single person and $98,914 for a family of four. Seventy percent of the youths and 30 percent of the adults who attend do so for free.

Following in Portland’s footsteps, community squash centers have popped up in cities around the country. The sport’s national governing body, U.S. Squash, in 2020 started its community initiative to grow inclusivity in the sport.

Takesian is the program’s senior adviser. To be accredited as a community facility, programs must demonstrate that they are committed to increasing access to the sport. There are 12 community squash centers up and running in the United States in cities including San Diego, Atlanta and Houston, and 40 more in the works. Once a sport reserved almost exclusively for the wealthy and elite, around 5,000 people are now part of community squash programs.

AFTER-SCHOOL BONUS

Public school students in the U.S. spend 20 to 25 percent of their waking hours in school. How they spend the rest of their time depends on the individual, their families and usually their socioeconomic status, with students from higher-income families having greater access to high-quality after-school, break and summer programs than students from lower-income families.

Studies consistently show that how students spend their out-of-school time affects their success in life. Students who participate in enriching and engaging activities outside of school are less likely to miss school and more likely to do better in class. Out-of-school programs also provide a safe place for students to go when their parents must work and school is not open. But these programs are often expensive, hard to get to and hard to find. 

In 2020, 25 million students – half the school-aged children in the United States – sought after-school programing but were unable find it, according to the After School Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group working to increase access to after-school and summer programs. 

Low-income, Black and Latino families were less able to find suitable after-school programs than other groups, the After School Alliance said. Those unable to find programming cited prohibitively high enrollment costs, a lack of transportation and limited programs with available slots. Portland Community Squash often has a waitlist of around 20 students for its after-school programs, said Takesian. 

Back in 2012, Takesian knew transportation and cost could be major barriers to accessing Portland Community Squash.

At the start of the program, when it was still being run out of the YMCA, Portland Community Squash staff picked up students from the two public schools closest to the facility – Portland High School and King Middle School – and walked them to the YMCA. 

Later on, Portland Community Squash bought a van to transport students, and now it owns three 14-passenger vans and transports around 50 kids a week. Everyone on staff takes turns driving – picking students up from schools around the city in the early afternoon and dropping them off at their homes at the end of the night.  

COME FOR SQUASH, STAY FOR THE RELATIONSHIPS

Meeting Portland Community Squash staff at student drop-off time is how Meirgani Alaari first got involved in the program. Three of his children joined in 2018. They had always been good students, he said, but after they joined the squash program they started to excel, becoming more disciplined in school and with their homework.  

Over the past four years, Alaari became increasingly involved in the program. Now he is the event director.

“What makes this place different is that it’s a whole family thing,” said Alaari. “A place where everyone can find a way to get involved.”  

One goal behind the expansion is to get more families involved the way Alaari is, to continue Portland Community Squash on its path to becoming a tight-knit, diverse and multi-generational community in which people come for the squash but stay for the relationships. 

Summer camp members said they feel like they can be themselves at Portland Community Squash. Alexa Bell, a rising seventh-grader at Lincoln Middle School, said she enjoys playing squash but likes the community even more. “You can just be yourself here and have fun,” she said

Mariam Hasson, a rising eighth-grader at Lyman Moore Middle School, has been going to Portland Community Squash since fourth grade. Hasson said she would like to play squash in college.  

“It’s great coming here because everyone is your friend and it’s super welcoming,” she said. “It’s just awesome here.” 

« Previous

Cup Series: Harvick earns first victory since 2020

Next »

UMaine athletic director leaving for NCAA Division III school