There is a particular kind of tension that lives inside elite athletes. It doesn’t show up on scoreboards or rankings. It sits somewhere between ambition and fear, masquerading as desire.
For Hania El Hammamy, it took years to recognise it for what it was.
“I wanted it too much,” she says. “And that was the problem.”
This is not the language athletes are taught to use. Wanting it too much is meant to be a virtue. Obsession is rewarded. Relentlessness admired. But El Hammamy learned - slowly, painfully - that there is a line where intensity curdles into desperation.
And desperation, she discovered, is not a fuel. It is a drag.
It showed itself most clearly in the biggest moments: World Championship finals, decisive matches, moments when the body is prepared but the mind begins to bargain.
The tighter she tried to control outcomes, the more they slipped away.
“I was playing for the result,” she says. “Not for the process.”
The shift came not through physical change, but psychological permission. Permission to lose. Permission to step back. Permission to accept that her value did not rise and fall with each rally.
Sports psychology, she explains, was not about tricks or affirmations. It was about perspective. About softening the internal voice that demanded perfection and replacing it with one that allowed curiosity.
This is where maturity enters — not as calmness, but as clarity. El Hammamy began to understand that belief is quieter than desperation. That confidence does not announce itself. That sometimes the strongest position an athlete can take is emotional neutrality.
She stopped trying to prove herself every time she stepped on court.
The results followed - the 2025 US Open, consistency of three back-to-back titles and then, the goal of a lifetime, ascent to World No.1.
In the latest Squash Player Podcast episode she speaks openly about identity beyond squash and about recognising that pressure is not something to be conquered, but contextualised.
