Joe Magor is staggered when people talk of squash declining in the UK. The evidence he sees every weekend at his sold-out amateur competitions simply does not tally with the pervading narrative of "a dying sport."
Magor's calendar of UK squash tournaments has been running for almost 20 years. He organises events virtually every weekend, principally in the south east of England, which are attended by thousands of passionate squash players of all levels.
Sponsored by CM Stringers, Magor's calendar of competitions has grown every year since he started in 2007. In 2025, he ran 63 tournaments which had a combined total of 3,640 entries. This year, he already has 71 tournaments scheduled and entrants are projected to exceed 4,000. The overall growth rate is over 600%.
Astoundingly, this isn't even Magor's full-time job. He is a freelance IT consultant (and admits that all his clients are people he met through playing squash!).
The formats of his events include full weekend tournaments, juniors, women's, team competitions, doubles, racketball, PSA Satellite and Challenger events and Pro-Ams, but his bread and butter, and by far the most popular, are one-day graded events.
Players absolutely love the graded format and clubs hosting Magor's tournaments know their courts, bar and kitchen will be packed out for the entire day.
The widespread adoption of Squash Levels in the amateur game in Britain has made graded events much easier to organise. And after all these years, Joe knows "all the cheat codes" to organising tournaments anyway. He has even produced a detailed blueprint to enable clubs to run his events without him on-site, if they prefer.
Magor generously shares his wisdom with two similar amateur competition circuits, Millie Tomlinson's Graded Squash Tour, which operates mostly in the Midlands, and Cai Younger's Matchpoint Squash which runs event mainly in the north.
Magor was the richly deserved winner of the 2025 England Squash Unsung Hero of the year award, which he received at the 100th British Junior Open in Birmingham in January. It's no exaggeration to call him a legend in British grassroots squash.
Joe is actually a Dubai-born Peruvian. During his peripatetic childhood (his father was a geologist), he attended boarding school in Malaysia where he played a lot of badminton.
He later lived in rural Wales before enrolling at the University of Kent in Canterbury. There, he met a fellow student who played squash for the England U19 team.
Staying on in Canterbury to do a Masters degree, Joe joined the town's squash club, and has remained a devoted member ever since, serving as club captain and committee member for many years. "It was supposed to be on an interim basis, but that interim period is still ongoing!" he jokes.
It was in 2006 at Wimbledon Racquets Club in London that Joe and his club mates first played in a graded tournament. "It was an amazing weekend and we met so many people," he remembers.
"I tried to find out when the next one was, but there were none. Wimbledon was the only one each year. Why didn't anyone else want to jump on this? The format was brilliant. It was like four tournaments in one."
Joe was involved in organising a full-weekend open tournament with prize money in Canterbury in 2007 which he repeated for the next two years. In 2010, they made it into a graded event as an experiment and the number of entries nearly doubled.
They maintained the format for the next three years. He said: "It was only one tournament a year. I was still learning how to do it. It was always incredible stressful. It was all new to me. Injuries and drop-outs would happen all the time. It was one disaster after another.
"The level of squash on the Sunday started getting problematic because people were hitting it hard in the town on Saturday night. The handful of people who made the effort to be sensible sometimes ended up playing opponents who looked like they'd fallen out of a bin!
"I thought, 'There's got to be a way of running this tournament in one day.' So I locked myself in a room for a whole weekend to try to devise a schedule of how many people I could get on four courts in a single day, from 9am-7pm."
Joe put his slimmed-down format into action to coincide with the 50th anniversary celebrations of Canterbury Squash Club in 2014. "We had a bouncy castle one one court and we had to make a rule to ensure people didn't jump from the balcony on to the castle!" he chuckles.
The following year, he organised another one-day event called the Fines Cup, where participants were given fines for serving out, being bageled or being caught out by a reverse angle boast.
It sold out in an hour and bar takings were double that of a two-day event. Players were eating and drinking all day as they didn't need to save themselves to compete on the Sunday. From that day, Magor's model shifted principally to one-day events, which now make up 90% of his tournament calendar.
After a mandatory hiatus during the pandemic, Magor's regular players returned hungry to get their competitive juices flowing again. The rising adoption of Squash Levels, change in people's health habits, and word-of-mouth amongst clubs about the financial benefits of hosting tournaments all combined for a surge in growth.
In 2022, there were 32 CM Strings tournaments, then 40 in 2023, 52 in 2024 and 63 last year. With 71 booked in for 2026, Joe cannot be at every event so now has a small team of event managers who help out. He also empowers on-site club coaches or other staff to run tournaments themselves via his detailed blueprint.
"We provide tournaments to clubs as an all-inclusive package," says Joe. "All they need is for their bar and kitchen to be open all day.
"Clubs can run it off my instructions so we don't always need to be there. We do all the promotion, devise the schedules, organise the admin, t-shirts and trophies and publish all the results on Squash Levels.
"If the in-house coach organises it, they can earn £100 more than if they spent eight consecutive hours coaching. When they discover that, they're pretty keen. We've had to limit each club to two events a year. I've not had to pitch to a club in eight years — they come to me."
One of the most poplar events on the calendar is the Cumberland Open in north-west London. This year, it sold out in three and a half minutes. Often, the waiting lists are bigger than the actual draws.
This level of demand is what makes Magor almost disbelieving of widespread stories of squash's grassroots decline.
"I wonder where they get these figures from," he says. "I started off with a player pool of 180 and we've now got 4,300 people actively playing in our events.
"We're growing every year. I get new enquiries every week and over the years we've added juniors, open, women's, racketball and more to the calendar. I don't anticipate it slowing down any time soon."
