CityView Becomes Latest Public Squash Club To Scrap Its Doubles Court by Rob Dinerman Dateline September 24th
--- Furthering what appears to be an alarming current trend, the
CityView Racquet Club in Long Island City, NY, which opened to great
fanfare in 2008 as New York's only public squash club whose facilities
included a hardball doubles court, informed its squash-playing
membership earlier this week that the doubles court will be converted
to a singles court in mid-October, bringing the number of singles
courts at the club to four. Notification of this decision was conveyed
on Tuesday, with no prior communication that anything along those lines
might be in the works, and on the eve of the start of the 2015-16
season.
This upcoming change, following as it does the similar
conversion of both of the doubles squash courts to singles courts at
the Fairmount Athletic Club in suburban Philadelphia in June, reflects
an apparent statistical reality that doubles courts occupy too much
space and are not financially viable enough for public squash
facilities like these, even when they are located in or near major
American cities, to justify their continuation. Both of these clubs
were launched at right around the same time in the latter part of the
first decade of the 2000's, and both find themselves increasingly
gearing their squash-related offerings to growing their respective
junior-squash programs, ultimately resulting in this decision, which,
in the case of the impending move at CityView, leaves New Yorkers in
the position of not having consistent access to doubles courts unless
they apply to and are accepted for membership at one of the five
private clubs in town that have a doubles court.
There is concern about some of the public squash clubs in
Canada possibly going in a similar direction as well, with troubling
implications for the expansion of doubles squash beyond its present
extremely limited constituency. The owners and managers of CityView,
which for the past two years has offered doubles-squash-only
memberships (even posting an ad last year for a pro position
specializing in doubles), have to know that it will lose any members
who joined on that basis, as they will definitely be moving someplace
else --- but where will they go?
