Schools of thought

I feel like I'm still a newbie to squash and only started seriously studying the sport a year ago rather than just treating it as a recreation to stay fit. But, in the past year or so I've started to take notice of two different style of play. One style I'll call traditional for a lack of a better term is played with a lot of precision and patience. It teaches a U-shaped stroke, footwork with skip steps, and arc'ing movement to the corners. I've been putting a lot of work into mastering these techniques. So it threw me for a loop when I started watching DVD's of championship pro matches and saw that the pro's play very differently from the techniques I've been learning. The pro's play a dynamic game. They use their wrist a lot more to change directions of the ball and to generate power. They don't hit up and down the wall as much as I'm taught to do.

Last year I took a lesson at the SF Bay Club from Mark Allen. He didn't say too much, but he did say if I wanted to play competitively I should modify my stroke to pronate in order to generate more power. Today after checking out Mark's website, it all seems to make sense to me now how these two schools of thought really fit together. The bread and butter strategy relies on masterful drives that are tight against the side wall and high enough to avoid a volley winner. The pro's still play the drives as a defensive play to move their opponents off the T, but yet when they are controlling the T, they play far more aggressively. That means you have to hit with a lot of pace thus the importance of pronating, and play with a lot of deception and speed. I can't do all those things right now and in fact I shouldn't try. I should build my game up one layer at a time, first mastering the traditional game but learning the basics of the stroke techniques. Then I train up the footwork to include more speed and longer fewer strides. When I'm finally comfortable that I have competent drive lengths and widths, I can add the short dynamic game to it and go for speed, nicks and angles.

It isn't a question which school is right and which school one should follow exclusively of the other. The two schools represent how the game has evolved and with it the way we train that combines the core competency of the traditional school and building on top of it the more dynamic game.