Words: James Zug
Everyone loves four-handed squash. The partnerships, sharing, team spirit, the fun of four on a court. And the hottest place for doubles right now might be Asia.
Squash doubles was created in October 1907. It happened by accident.
The Racquet Club of Philadelphia was opening a new clubhouse on Sixteenth Street. Amidst two racquets, one court tennis and five squash singles courts going in on the fourth floor, an empty space (forty-five feet by twenty-five feet; 13,716mm by 7,600 mm) loomed.
The construction engineers didn’t know what to do. The space was too big for singles, too small for another racquets court, and pilates and spinning and Zumba hadn’t been invented. Fred Tompkins, RCOP’s head professional, told the club’s managers that it was the perfect space for the grand old English game of squash doubles.
RCOP, ever attuned to all things Anglo, agreed to build the court, even though Tompkins was fibbing—there was no grand old English game of doubles. It was the first purpose-built squash doubles court in the world.
After the First World War, doubles took off in North America, with dozens of forty-five by twenty-five foot courts being built around the U.S. and a national championship launched in 1933. A specific doubles ball was created; it flew even faster than the North American hardball singles ball. Canada got going, putting up courts in the 1920s and starting a national championship in 1934.
Today North America has a robust doubles community: approximately 140 courts in the U.S., another forty-five in Canada (two-thirds are in and around Toronto) and a half dozen in Mexico (mostly in Mexico City, but there is one in Tijuana).
There is also a lone court carved into rock in the basement of a home in Barbados. Players use a Dunlop hardball doubles ball, and most players use rackets that weigh 145 or 150 grams.
Two levels of the game show serious vitality: a continental-wide pro tour of men’s, women’s and mixed events in fifteen states and provinces boasts total prize money over $600,000 and a passionate cohort of thousands of amateurs play leagues, member-guests, invitationals and tournaments of all sorts.
And there are annual doubles matches between the U.S. & Canada and the U.S. & Mexico.
Lest anyone think that squash doubles was some odd western hemisphere invention, soon to be scuppered like hardball singles was by a more dominant softball version, please ponder the late 1930s in Great Britain.
London, 1935: it was doubles or nothing. Both St. John’s Wood Squash Club and Ladies’ Carlton Club built forty-five by twenty-five-foot doubles courts and Prince’s Court renovated a racquets court and put in a fifty-four by thirty court.
In Scotland in October 1937 the Edinburgh Sports Club opened a doubles court. Balls were imported from the U.S. In 1938, England Squash held national championships in doubles for both amateurs and professionals (Roy McKelvie, later a famous journalist, won the amateur and Don Butcher, the two-time British Open champ, took the pro draw).
In 1937 at St. John’s Wood in London and in 1938 at Edinburgh Sports Club, the first Test squash matches between England and Scotland were played. In both Tests, the match consisted of five singles and two doubles (England won both times). Some legendary participants those two years included K.C Gandar-Dower, McKelvie, Edward Snell and Frank Strawson.
A favourite quote came out of that era. In 1937 Squash Rackets & Fives magazine described the St. John’s court:
“It is magnificent, and it makes squash seem an infinitely greater game even if one merely contemplates the empty court. There is no doubt at all that doubles games are infinitely superior to singles if only because they introduce that element of team spirit and combination which are so essential to sport. With the introduction of doubles there should really be no limit to the playing life of the happy squash player.”
The Second World War killed doubles in England.
The courts at St. John’s and Ladies’ Carlton were destroyed in the Battle of Britain and Prince’s closed when the War Office requisitioned its clubhouse.
Only Scotland is left. Today Edinburgh Sports Club continues to have a proper doubles court, the only one left in Europe. There is sporadic play there but generally the court is unused in comparison to ESC’s padel and tennis facilities outside.
Until the 1980s, all official standardised doubles was the North American version.
In 1986 some Royal Automobile Club players in England created a softball doubles court and it is thirty-two by twenty-five-foot court (9,750 mm by 7,620mm). By the 1990s the word “hardball” was slowly attached to the North American version to differentiate itself from this upstart softball variant.
Today there are about thirty permanent softball doubles courts in North America. The game is somewhat popular in the rest of the world, though it is losing significant ground to padel.
Softball doubles has been a medal sport at numerous international multi-sport games, like the Commonwealth Games (since 1998) and the Pan-American Games (1995). In December 2025, the thirty-third Southeast Asian Games were held in Thailand.
Squash, one of the fifty sports included in the SEA Games, featured singles and doubles. The men’s and the mixed doubles, for under twenty-one-year-olds, were both won by Malaysia; silver went twice to Philippines; and bronze was twice shared by Indonesia and Singapore.
But the SEA Games doubles was not on a softball court but rather on a standard hardball court. This game, nicknamed jumbo doubles, is an astonishing Asian secret.
In the early 1980s, the story goes, officials with the Royal Bangkok Sports Club reached out to the World Squash Federation, probably by fax, asking the official standards for doubles. At the time, there was just the North American game, so those forty-five by twenty-five dimensions are what they faxed back to Thailand.
And thus, a standard doubles court appeared in Asia for the first time.
RBSC, one of Asia’s oldest and most exclusive clubs, nurtured the game. They created a style of play of one-up & one-back, rather than the usual formation of right wall & left wall in hardball doubles. This stemmed in part because they used a slower softball unlike the North American doubles ball. In the late 1980s they coopted the Chieng Mai Cup, a doubles tournament that had originally been started in 1910 at the Gymkhana Club in northern Thailand.
Under RBSC, the Chieng Mai became a wildly successful jumbo doubles event attracting players from around Asia. The eighty-sixth iteration will be held this April.
Just like RCOP seeded the game in the States, RBSC’s pioneering work inspired other clubs to build hardball doubles courts or as they started to call them in Asia, jumbo squash courts.
In 1997 Raintree Club in Kuala Lumpur erected a court; they added a second in 2004. In 1998 Tanglin Club in Singapore put in a court and they too added a second, in 2001; nearby the Singapore Island Country Club added a court in 2011. More recent additions were at Vajiravudh College, an all-boys boarding school in Bangkok and at the Rizal Memorial Sports Centre in Manila, Philippines.
They use a double yellow dot softball: except RBSC’s, all the jumbo courts are not air-conditioned and with the endemic Asian heat and humidity, the softball seems bouncy enough for good doubles.
Annual tournaments, like in North America, cement the Asian doubles community. Tanglin host an event in February, RBSC has the Chieng Mai in May, SICC has one in August and Raintree hosts in October.
“They attract good international crowds,” said Alex Wan, general manager of Singapore Squash and a veteran squash journalist.
“Players come from Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Sri Lanka.”
The draws have open and masters (over fifty) categories. In regular play, scoring is to fifteen (with a tiebreaker of one or three if the score gets to 14-14).
At the Chieng Mai Cup, before the quarter-finals, scoring is two games to eleven with a three-point tiebreaker; quarters on is best of three, to eleven points.
Field Pickering, an American ex-pat who has been living in Singapore since 2011, plays in many of these events.
“The Tanglin tournament is very lively, with lots of spectators coming and going,” said Pickering.
“It’s just like a doubles tournament in the States. Spouses come watch a bit of squash then wander off to shop or sightsee. And we have a sitting area off the squash courts where people socialise throughout the event.
“There is a big farewell lunch on the Sunday to finish off the weekend. We get a lot of Australians: there is no doubles court in Australia so this the opportunity for the Aussies to get in their doubles fix.”
The SEA Games leverage jumbo doubles when they are hosted in a city with hardball doubles courts: in 2015 in Singapore and 2017 in Kuala Lumpur and this past year in Bangkok.
“Doubles is an important discipline in Southeast Asia,” Wan said.
“This is because Malaysia is currently far ahead in terms of playing standards. For singles' events, other nations are basically fighting for the silver (team) or bronzes (individual) given their superiority. It is only in doubles events where the playing field is more levelled.
“The doubles events at the SEA Games in Thailand were well attended—it was a full house during semis and finals, as far as the venue could take, maybe 150 people. The Malaysians outclassed everyone. In the mixed, while they lost narrowly to the Philippines in the group stages, they came back strongly in both semis and finals, winning very convincingly.
“Their boys had a similar story, despite dropping a game in the final. Skills-wise, it was very apparent they were superior to everyone else. Winning a bronze medal, nonetheless, helps nations gain government funding for the sport.”
Jumbo doubles is a core part of the squash community in many countries, both with aging masters players but also with the national teams. In Singapore, for instance, the national team trains at Tanglin and regularly practices on the doubles courts.
The game is so established that there are now some lost courts. Indonesia used to have a jumbo doubles court: in Surabaya a court was built in 2000, but it was later turned into a badminton court.
Remarkably, Myanmar used to have two hardball courts. Following the 2015 SEA Games, the Myanmar Sports Authority erected twin squash facilities in 2016 that had two singles and one jumbo doubles court: one was in Yangon and one in Napidyaw. The facility in Napidyaw quickly fell into disrepair; the Yangon Squash Club flourished, with a full-time coach and the national team training there.
“I started going to the country for work back then, looking at early-stage technology investments,” said Pickering.
“We found the facility and held the first Yangon Cup there in November 2017, another leg of the Asian doubles circuit. We had players from Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. It was a great success.
“The 2018 Yangon Cup got changed three days before because Pope Francis was speaking near the squash club in Yangon. We scrambled and borrowed a singles court at the residence of the Australian ambassador to Myanmar. It ended up being a fantastic weekend. In 2019 we returned to the doubles court, and it was bigger than ever: momentum was growing around the Asia-Pacific squash community for the Yangon Cup.”
Then squash in Myanmar suffered two giant blows. The Covid pandemic shut squash down in early 2020 and in February 2021 a coup d’etat led to violence, civil disobedience, arrests and mass displacement and that was the end of the Yangon Cup.
But squash miraculously continues there, as Myanmar sent four squash players to the 2025 SEA Games.
With eight busy doubles courts, Asia is confirming what they said in Great Britain nearly ninety years ago: doubles is the infinitely greater game.
