From a special school in Peshawar to her first PSA Tour title in Australia, Sana Bahadar is building a career in squash against obstacles that would have stopped many before they started. With the support of her father, Qamar Zaman and Noreena Shams, Pakistan’s deaf and non-speaking rising star is beginning to believe that there may be no limit to where the game can take her.
There was something fitting about Sana Bahadar’s first PSA Tour title arriving 6,000 miles from home.
On 16 August, in Bendigo, Victoria, the 20-year-old Pakistani defeated former world No.1 Rachael Grinham to win the Bendigo Open. It was the biggest title of her career, lifting her to a career-high world ranking of No.181 and providing a tangible reward for years of persistence.
For most players, winning a PSA event is difficult enough. For Bahadar, the journey to this point has required her to navigate obstacles that would have deterred many before they had even picked up a racket.
She has been deaf since birth and is unable to communicate through speech. She cannot hear the ball coming off an opponent’s racket, the referee’s calls or the noise of the crowd. In training, she must watch every movement of her coaches and partners. Away from court, communication remains a daily challenge.
Yet none of that has stopped her.
If anything, squash has become the language through which Bahadar has found confidence, independence and a sense of belonging.
“My ambition is to get into the top 10 and become the first ever player in the top 10 with such disabilities,” she says through her father, Sher Bahadar. “I also want to become a top player to make my father proud to have a daughter like me. I want to support him in his old age.”
The Bendigo title is another step towards that ambition.
It is also the latest chapter in a story that began in Peshawar, when Bahadar was still a child at a special school and sport was little more than a distant possibility.
Bahadar could not read or write until she was 15. Her father admits that he was once “extremely worried about her future”.
Then, in 2016, when Sana was 10, an ex-national hockey coach, Rauf Khan, visited her school. He encouraged Sher to introduce his daughter to sport and, crucially, connected the pair with one of Pakistan’s most celebrated sporting figures: Qamar Zaman.
Zaman had been world No.1, won the British Open in 1975 and become one of the defining figures in Pakistan’s extraordinary squash history - he took the young Bahadar under his wing.
Zaman coaches both Sana and her brother Saifullah, who is also deaf and non-speaking.
When he first met Sana, Zaman saw something that others might have missed.
“I thought she could be a very good player because she cannot speak and she cannot hear, so her attention will be 100% on squash,” he says.
That prediction was based not on sentiment but on what Zaman saw in her. 10 years later, he is still convinced there is considerably more to come.
“I am so happy about the PSA title in Australia,” he says. “She is working hard. I want to see her at the top level. If she continues to work hard, she will become much better than she is playing now.
“Communicating is very hard, but she is improving. She is a fighter. If she keeps working hard, she can maybe make it to the top 60.”
Squash is a sport built around sound.
The crack of the racket. The bounce of the ball. The calls from the referee. The roar of a crowd after a spectacular rally. For Bahadar, all of it happens in silence.
“In training, I have to keep an eye on each and every movement of my trainer and partners,” she explains.
“In matches, I don’t hear anything from the crowd, referee or impact of the ball, especially when the opponent hits the ball and the racket strings make a sound which gives you a signal how that ball is played.”
The absence of sound is only part of the challenge.
Communication away from the court can be just as difficult.
“On a daily basis I find it very difficult to communicate my feelings and my thoughts to other people,” she says.
“Most of the time I feel like I have been discussed by my coaches and other players but I fail to understand what they are actually talking about. But if they speak specifically to me then somehow I understand the meaning from the movement of their lips.”
Her father has become her principal bridge to the hearing world.
“He understands exactly what I want to say and what I am feeling about different situations,” she says.
“He also communicates the words of my fellow players and coaches to me by using sign language. I’ve now got some friends who understand my sign language too and they are also able to respond in the same way.”
There is, she says, one unexpected advantage.
“The biggest advantage to being deaf is that I don’t hear negative things from any of my competitors or other people.”
It is a characteristic Bahadar shares with another remarkable figure in her support network: Noreena Shams.
Shams is a philanthropist, sports administrator and advocate for women and athletes’ rights in Pakistan. She also competes on the PSA Tour and has spent much of the past decade campaigning for sportspeople facing the kinds of barriers she encountered growing up in Lower Dir, in Pakistan’s north-west.
Her childhood was shaped by school closures, restrictions on women’s education and participation in sport, and the death of her father amid Taliban attacks on her home town.
Those experiences eventually led her to establish the Noorena Shams Foundation.
Her relationship with Bahadar is personal as well as professional. She has helped with fundraising and publicity and describes herself as an “enabler on her incredible journey”.
“I love Sana’s persistence and never-give-up attitude,” Shams says. “How disciplined she is, and how she does not bow down to circumstances. I love her focus.
“Seeing her become the best right in front of me, without any fancy training, is straight-up inspiring and makes you jump out of bed to go for training.
"Her positive attitude, not being upset over the lack of resources, and making the most of what she has, is extremely inspiring."
Shams first saw Bahadar on court eight years ago.
“It was just eight years ago when she stepped onto the court right in front of me. I am really proud of how, within such a short span of her career, she has been able to adapt to something and excel in it.
“She is Pakistan’s No.1 right now. Who would not be proud of her?”
Shams' principal focus for the last decade has been on her activism and the work of her foundation, advocating for other sportswomen facing adversity and challenges in Pakistan. She has highlighted these challenges on many high-profile platforms such as the UN Human Rights Council Social Forum. She sits on the board of four different sports governing bodies, and is the youngest member of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Sports Management Committee.
Sana’s struggle to communicate resonates with her own experience of growing up in an environment in which she was expected to remain quiet and accept the limitations imposed upon her.
“I see many elements of my own experience not only in Sana’s struggle but in those of almost all the athletes of my region,” Shams says.
“We all have something that we do not talk about very openly. In Sana’s case in particular, her struggle of being unable to speak and have a voice of her own really resonates with my journey.”
Shams left home at 11 to pursue a life as an athlete. She describes those years as a search for her own voice.
“I was supposed to blend in, stay in a box, find people like myself to be with, and not be loud against the injustice or wrongdoings around me,” she says. “I was supposed to just hold a racket, silently play, never question, and simply bow down.
“That’s why I see my younger self in the girls around me like Sana — girls struggling with finances, cultural pressure, limited resources, and not having an ally.
“And I see myself in the young boys too, who face backlash or discrimination due to their backgrounds, tribes, regions and many other factors. Perhaps that’s why I never gave up — so I could become their voice.”
Bahadar’s rise has not been easy even after she established herself as Pakistan’s leading junior player.
She was ranked No.1 nationally in every junior age group and accumulated a long list of national titles. She has represented Pakistan internationally and has already played 18 PSA Tour events.
But the transition from junior squash to the professional game brought a different scale of challenge.
“I was a bit frustrated and hopeless when I turned 19, because I had to swim in the bigger ocean of PSA,” she says. “To survive it is difficult and very, very expensive to travel and play PSA events in different countries without any sponsors.”
Her training base is the PAF Hashim Khan Squash Complex in Peshawar, where she benefits from court time provided by the Pakistan Squash Federation. Financial support beyond that, however, remains limited.
The World U23 Championships in Karachi in 2024 provided a rare opportunity to measure herself against some of the strongest young players in the world.
“That was a life-changing and full-of-hope tournament for me,” she says. “I met the best players from different countries and got the opportunity to learn from them.”
Now Australia has provided another, even more significant, breakthrough.
Defeating Grinham in the Bendigo final was not simply a title victory. It was evidence that Bahadar’s game can travel, compete and win beyond the confines of the environment in which she developed.
And she has already learned something important about the demands of the professional game: adversity does not disappear when you succeed. It simply changes shape.
There is a precedent for a deaf woman reaching the highest levels of professional squash.
Rebecca Macree, who was born deaf, represented England in the team that won the World Team Championship in 2000. She reached world No.7 and won eight titles on the WISPA Tour.
Bahadar and her father were unaware of Macree’s story when Sana first began her journey.
Perhaps that makes her progress all the more remarkable. She has been pursuing a path without knowing that somebody had already shown what might be possible.
Now she has a precedent. She also has a title, a career-high ranking and a growing network of people who believe she can go considerably further.
Zaman’s target is world No.60. Bahadar has her eyes higher still.
“I want to become a top player,” she says.
For her father, though, the numbers and trophies tell only part of the story.
“She has many achievements,” Sher says, “however for me the biggest achievement is the confidence level she has gained from playing squash.”
Eight years ago, Sana Bahadar was a child who could not hear, could not speak and had only recently begun to find her way through a world that was not designed for her.
Today she is a PSA Tour champion.
The title came in Australia, thousands of miles from Peshawar. It came against a former world No.1. And it came without her hearing the applause that followed it.
