The Man Who’s Ripping Up Squash’s Rulebook
By Nathan Clarke
Squash has always been a sport that prides itself on its walls—on the enclosed, air-conditioned cubes that have long kept outsiders exactly there - outside.
For decades, squash has existed behind private club memberships and polite, echoing rallies, played in the hours between business lunches and after-school coaching sessions. It is a sport of insiders, of gatekeepers, of people who like their clubs exactly as they have always been.
And then there is Aron Harper-Robinson.
In many areas squash in England has long been an inward-looking game, Harper-Robinson has made it his life’s work to pry open the doors, to dismantle the walls—both literal and metaphorical—that have kept so many out and take squash to the masses - by any means possible.
As the founder of Calder Community Squash (CCS), he has spent the last five years launching pioneering, grassroots programmes that challenge everything squash thinks it knows about itself.
Many in the sport bemoan dwindling numbers, the thinning out of memberships and the increasingly middle-aged memberships.
Harper-Robinson looks at squash and sees not a dying sport, but one that has simply forgotten who it is supposed to be for.
“Clubs look at their courts, they look at their membership numbers, and they think: ‘Well, why aren’t people coming to us?’” he says. “But that’s not how it works. You have to ask: Why aren’t we going to them?”
And so Harper-Robinson has done just that. Squash from the Mosque, Mixed Ability Squash, We See You, Bounce Back - each a pioneering programme not just bringing new people into squash, but fundamentally challenging the way the sport perceives itself.
His work has seen Muslim women playing for the first time, refugees picking up rackets in hotel car parks, disabled players stepping onto courts built for bodies that were never designed with them in mind.
In an ageing sport still clutching onto its traditional models, Harper-Robinson is not simply running a squash programme - he’s single-handedly showing the there is a way to change the game.
Like so many before him, Harper-Robinson fell out of love with squash before he ever found his way back to it.
As a teenager, he dreamed of being a professional player. By 16, he was burnt out - he walked away.
Years passed playing music, working in kitchens and making a living in a world far removed from the courts he had once known.
And yet, something nagged at him. Squash, the game he had once abandoned, still had something to offer.
Pushing 40, he got involved once again with a local club in Halifax. He knew squash had a participation problem. He also knew nobody was doing anything about it - it was a lightbulb moment.
“I was working as a chef and we had two kids and I had this sort of epiphany moment,” he recalls.
“I knew the club was struggling. I knew squash as a game wasn't particularly flying, you know. I just thought to myself ‘what if I could do it differently?’ What if I tried to use squash as a way to bring people together.”
Three weeks later, he handed in his notice, walked out of the kitchen for the last time, and threw himself into squash. No backup plan. No safety net. Just faith that it could work.
“The club just wasn’t representative of the community around it,” he says. “There’s a mosque down the road with 600 kids going to it. So why weren’t they playing squash?”
It was the same story up and down the country—squash clubs sitting half-empty, in the middle of communities that never even knew they existed.
“I realised, if squash was going to survive, we couldn’t just keep doing what we’d always done,” he says. “Because what we’d always done wasn’t working.
“Our tag line is ‘Be The Change’ and I truly believe that. You have to show people the way, set a good example and show them what is possible. I’ve always had a creative mind and I think that was what has helped me live that mantra and pursue my ideas without worrying about failure.”
And so he set about doing something different - and that is where one of his first pioneering programmes - Squash From The Mosque - was born.
But the first problem was trust.
“When I first started trying to get into the mosque, I nearly gave up - in fact I almost gave up a number of times,” Harper-Robinson admits.
“There was a lot of suspicion, a lot of: Who is this white guy trying to get our kids onto a squash court?”
But where others might have seen a closed door, Harper-Robinson saw an opportunity waiting to be unlocked.
He found an ally—Hassan Riaz, a community leader at the mosque—who helped him set up a pop-up squash session in the car park.
“My brother and I turned up, got the nets up, and about 50 kids in traditional Islamic dress came out,” he says. “And I just knew we were onto something.
“We’d come into this community that had never previously had any experience with the sport. We’d put ourselves out there and done everything we could to get a racket in their hands. Here we were, in the car park, with all these young kids getting exposed to squash for the first time.
“It didn’t matter that it wasn’t on a squash court - who cares where people play the game! The fact was, they were playing squash in one form or another and that can only be a good thing - and we knew that if they had a good time, we could transition them into the club.
“Junior membership at the squash club was 16 quid at the time. So I was ready to buy all the memberships we needed - anything to take away barriers as much as possible.
“We don’t want walls - that's segregation. We want integration.”
Within weeks, the programme had moved from the mosque to the club, with boys from the sessions becoming full junior members. Then the parents started asking—what about the girls?
“Getting the girls involved took time,” he says. “There was three years of building trust, of being consistent, of listening, or understanding the challenges and the differences that another community face.
“And it had to be led by the community.
When the girls came, the mothers followed. Now, Muslim women—some of whom had never played sport before—were stepping onto squash courts for the first time.
“When you get the women involved,” he says, “you change everything.”
Today, Squash from the Mosque is running in over 25 clubs nationwide and a handful of the women first introduced to the game have gone on to become qualified squash coaches. The community is now coaching the community - ensuring the game has a future in a pocket of the country where it had never previously been considered.
If Squash from the Mosque was about religion and representation, Harper-Robinson’s next projects tackled the sport’s other barriers—mental health, disability, and economic status.
‘BounceBack’ a mental health programme for men, uses squash as a space for connection—a game of physical chess that doubles as a support group.
‘We See You’ brings in asylum seekers housed in local hotels, offering them a space to belong while ‘Mixed Ability Squash’ gives disabled players coaching, competition, and a community built for them. ‘Squash And Scran’ uses the sport as a vehicle for local young men to learn more about cooking and healthy eating.
One by one, Harper-Robinson is stripping away the excuses that have kept squash static.
The clubs, he says, have been their own worst enemies.
“They’re the gatekeepers, stuck in the 80s, still thinking there’s a waiting list of people desperate to join,” he says. “They’d rather go down with a sinking ship than reach out to the communities right on their doorstep.”
It is, as Harper-Robinson sees it, a choice.
“You can either open your doors, engage with the communities around you, or you can sit there, waiting for the members who are never coming back.
“We see time and time again that once people are exposed to squash, the physical exercise and the community that surrounds it creates this incredible space. But we have to go out there and get people interested - take the game to them. We can’t just rest on our laurels.
“What we’ve done here is create an energy and create what is now a club for everyone - and I think people can feel that.”
Harper-Robinson’s passion is palpable - you can feel the energy coming off him as he discusses his projects and his ideas for the future. Yet, amongst his dreams, running a squash club does not factor. He doesn’t want to be CEO of anything.
If his work is to truly succeed, it must be bigger than him.
“I don’t want to be doing this forever,” he says. “The goal is for this to just be the way squash operates.”
His vision is of every city having its own Calder Community Squash—clubs and programmes run by local communities, for local communities.
He is already working with over 30 coaches nationwide to bring his programmes to more clubs, more courts, more communities.
His work earned him a seat at the table with England Squash, where he is now pushing clubs nationwide to rethink inclusion, rewrite engagement strategies, and scrap outdated ideas about who plays the game.
“I feel like we’re on the cusp of something,” he says. “People are watching. Change is happening. Now we just need the sport to wake up and realise it - we need people in the game at all levels to think bigger.”
Squash has always been a game of walls.
It is a sport that has kept itself locked away—content to shrink rather than change, to fade rather than open itself up to the world.
Harper-Robinson is tearing down those walls.
What comes next for squash is no longer up to him. It is up to the sport itself.
“To thrive,” he says, “squash has to become a community sport, not a club sport.
“The way I see it, we have two choices: we either open the doors, or we board them up.”
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