By James Zug
Guido Grassi is a top-class athlete in his fifties. He grew up in Argentina and was a serious rugby player—a full-back and fly-half-good enough to go to Australia to play for a year at age nineteen.
He loved tennis, squash, padel. “I was a sportsman all my life,” said Grassi, who works for a global agribusiness company.
“I flew with my squash racket and played around the world.”
In 2019, while living in Bangkok, he played rugby sevens in a semi-professional league with other expatriates. In one game, an opponent tackled him, tearing multiple ligaments in his left knee.
During the subsequent surgery to reconstruct the knee, the doctor inadvertently cut Grassi’s femoral nerve. No implants, no grafting, no transplanting: his left leg was left permanently dysfunctional.
Suddenly, Grassi went from getting his physical, mental and social health boosted each day by sports to being bound to a wheelchair.
“It was the four most miserable years of my life,” Grassi said. “I was super depressed. I felt like I was eighty.”
Last year, after moving to Lyon, France, Grassi started playing squash. It was not easy. For months he had tried to persuade the coaches at Tennis Club de Lyon to let him use one of the two squash courts, but they were worried that the wheels would leave black marks on the floor. Grassi eventually found wheels that didn’t mark— regular tennis wheelchair wheels can sometimes mark. He bought a sport wheelchair, which was expensive (they easily run to five figures). Then there was the issue of popping the wheels on and off to get in and out of the court (Grassi does it himself by crawling).
Squash can be painful in a wheelchair. Grassi’s fingers get caught in the wheel as he pushed to go get a ball, and he broke his pinkie fingers a total of five times. Until he donned gloves, he got serious blisters. He constantly regrips his racket—after two matches, the grip is shredded.
Then the spinning—a common technique in wheelchair sports is to spin after hitting the ball to get momentum towards the next shot. But since the reaction time is shorter in squash than other racket sports, you are spinning constantly. “I felt like I had drunk a litre of beer,” Grassi said.
Today, Grassi plays badminton on Wednesday evenings, squash on Fridays, tennis on the weekends. “If there is a will, there is a way,” Grassi said. “Let’s promote disabled spaces. You can have fun and be challenged. That is what everyone wants.”
For all the talk about access, squash lags far behind other sports on supporting differently abled people. For many sports, the Paralympic Games is the shopwindow. They started in 1960 and today are one of the largest and most celebrated multi-sport international events in the world.
Wheelchair tennis has been perhaps in the vanguard. 
It was invented nearly a half century ago, in 1977, when Brad Parks, an American disabled from a skiing accident, tried playing in a wheelchair on a court next to the hospital where he was recovering. France took the helm, putting a national programme in place in 1982.
Today, wheelchair tennis is a part of all four Grand Slam tournaments. Last summer at the French Open, I saw the finals of the men’s wheelchair singles on Roland Garros’ centre court’ just a few hours before the finals of the regular women’s singles; the skill, artistry and passion of the players was astonishing.
A world tour has a total prize money of nearly $2 million. Since 1992 wheelchair tennis has been a medal sport in the Paralympics Games. Five wheelchair players, including Parks, have been inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. Two years ago, the US Open became the first Grand Slam to offer wheelchair juniors.
Other racket sports are right in the mix: wheelchair racketball, wheelchair badminton, wheelchair padel and wheelchair table tennis are bonafide sports, with national and international support and leadership.
There are 31 medals on offer at the 2024 Paralympics Games in Paris in table tennis, 14 in badminton. racketball has had world championships.
Basketball, fencing and rugby are also official wheelchair sports in the Paralympics Games and vibrant around the world. Wheelchair basketball was started after the Second World War in the U.S., and the National Wheelchair Basketball Association now features more than two hundred teams.
Nearly every other sport has a dynamic para version: wheelchair lacrosse, wheelchair soccer, wheelchair field hockey, wheelchair softball, wheelchair weightlifting, wheelchair bowling, wheelchair snooker, wheelchair archery.
Pinehurst hosted the first U.S. Adaptive Golf Championship in 2022. Extreme sports like wheelchair motocross and wheelchair mountain biking are popular. Wheelchairs are a part of para triathlon. Wheelchair racing is perhaps the most visible of any para sport: the Boston Marathon sanctioned wheelchairs in 1975, and today most of the world’s 800 annual marathons begin with an exodus of wheelchair athletes.
Squash, meanwhile, is barely moving. There are no leagues, no tournaments, no rankings. All efforts are isolated in pockets. Squash remains unsanctioned by the International Paralympics Committee, which impedes awareness.
General rules for wheelchair squash are that a wheel needs to be in the service box; wheelchair players get two bounces; and players must wear eye protection. Some use Squash57 balls and rackets, some don’t. A key obstacle about wheelchair squash is another piece of equipment: the door. Almost all doors into squash courts are too small for sport wheelchairs (a regular wheelchair you might see in an airport doesn’t really work for playing sports), so the chair needs to be brought on court by popping the wheels off.
Around the world, there are little hints of progress. At the French Open in Paris in 2023, wheelchair squash was exhibited in-between sessions.
“It needs some kind of imagination and getting out of the box sometimes,” said Eric Nizard, a lead promoter of the tournament. In Wales, Rich Plenty has promoted wheelchair squash, in part because his daughter, who has cerebral palsy, likes to play.
Squash Australia has hosted some play at their national training center in Canberra, using a regular racket and a Squash57 ball.
“We are yet to make any significant progress regarding opportunities for people living with a disability,” said Shaun McEachin, the national lead for sports development at Squash Australia.
“Our most recent focus has been on the development of opportunities for the LGBTQ+ community resulting in the successful delivery of our Rainbow rackets Pride Open for a second year and adoption of an LGBTQ+ Inclusion Policy.
Supporting people living with a disability has been identified as an area that we need to progress. However, we also have some significant priority areas that need to be addressed that will ultimately facilitate our ability to provide greater support for people living with a disability.”
Within squash circles, the Pied Piper has been Lolly Gillen.
An accomplished player in Toronto, Gillen has chaired both Squash Ontario and Squash Canada and is currently the secretary-general of Federacion Panamericana de Squash.
In January 2019, she helped launch the Canadian Inclusivity Squash Programme for emotionally, mentally and physically challenged people. That work led her to collaborating with the World Squash Federation’s Patrick Osborn (the chair of the WSF’s Squash57 Commission). In September 2021 Gillen and Osborn produced a three-page WSF report on wheelchair squash.
In December 2022 Gillen started a wheelchair squash programme at the Toronto Cricket & Curling Club. She persuaded a wheelchair curler, Shauna Petrie, to come upstairs and try squash. Petrie sustained a spinal cord injury in a parachuting accident when she was 16. Gillen showed her a video of Robin Ammerlaan playing squash.
“Shauna had played wheelchair tennis and wasn’t really interested in pursuing another racket sport, until I showed her Robin’s promo,” Gillen said. “Being a feisty, highly competitive curler, her curiosity got the better of her and she tried it.” Gillen filmed a clip of the first session, posted it on Instagram and it went viral.
“Now Shauna was famous and I had her full attention,” Gillen said.
Within months, nine wheelchair players were coming to Toronto Cricket’s courts each week. Usually a wheelchair athlete played against an able-bodied person. As the programme expanded Squash Canada stepped in to help purchase four sport wheelchairs.
Gillen has proselytised: she’s organised exhibitions at the Canadian Women’s Open, the Canadian Junior Open and the Canadian Men’s Open and reached out to other Canadian provinces. Today there are nascent programmes in Alberta, British Columbia and Nova Scotia.
The face of wheelchair squash is Robin Ammerlaan. He grew up in The Netherlands. In 1997, still a teenager, he was disabled after spinal bifida back surgery. Unable to walk, he first tried wheelchair badminton. Within seven months the right-hander was European champion and world No.1. Then it was tennis.
“I’m the kind of guy who likes challenges,” said Ammerlaan. “It took me years to become skilled in tennis, so I liked that.” He did exceptionally well: he got to world No.1 and captured fourteen-time Grand Slam championships.
In the Paralympics in Sydney 2000 he earned a gold medal in doubles; in Athens in 2004 he got gold in singles. Ammerlaan retired after the London Games in 2012.
He soon was an active padel player. Today he plays padel about eight hours a week and enters tournaments in France and Spain. He has played in a portable padel court in front of the Eiffel Tower.
Squash was a natural choice as well. Back in the 1990s when he was walking, Ammerlaan had played a couple of times a month at a club in Amsterdam.
“The first day back in a wheelchair was hard,” he said. “We were using a double yellow dot ball. My wheels kept hitting the walls. It is a smaller space than tennis or badminton or even padel. You have to react faster. The brain is the one that makes the decision—forehand or backhand? All the angles.”
He started playing squash regularly. Today he gets through the door by wheeling himself in via his regular chair, pulling the sport wheelchair with its wheels popped off, then popping the wheels back on, switching chairs and pulling his regular wheelchair off. It takes about three minutes. He has learned to use his left hand to push off the side walls, using it as a bumper.
Ammerlaan plays squash twice a week— once with the son of the owner of the squash complex near his house in Susteren and once with his father-in- law, Hans den Dulk.
A few years ago Ammerlaan did an exhibition of wheelchair squash at European Team Championships in Eindhoven and made a short promotional video about playing squash. Ammerlaan advised for the 2021 WSF report, suggesting the tennis sport wheelchair was better for squash than the badminton chair and that the Squash57 racket and ball made more sense than regular squash (shorter swing arc, more time).
Like with regular squash, a goal is for squash to get inclusion in the International Paralympics Committee. But Ammerlaan also seeks integration within the larger squash community.
“We think too much about the division of able bodied and disabled,” Ammerlaan said. “It was always in wheelchair tennis: ignorance. People just don’t know wheelchair squash is out there. You have to show that it is possible. We want to play with able-bodied people. I tell able-bodied people when we get out there: ‘Just try to win, do your best. The only difference is I get two bounces. Otherwise it’s squash.’ And why do we play? For the community. The best part of squash is having a beer afterwards, the social contacts, the networking.”
