Not long ago I was reading a very interesting sports medicine article in one of the major journals. The article was all about human muscles and the filaments between the muscles that allowed for rapid succession of full force and rest. For example, a runner, or someone who does low-weight, high-rep curls in the gym might move their muscles very quickly, and this filament would move back and forth. It seems to me that if we wanted to improve the game of squash, we could create a squash ball with a filament inside that would move.
Imagine this for a second if you can; As you hit the squash ball, and depending on how hard you hit it, the filament will push forward changing the shape of the ball to an airfoil, the shape of the wing. When the ball hits the backboard, the filament bounces back and the wing shape returns to the player. This would make the sport faster, higher paced, and actually more fun for the players. Is this something we can do with the game of squash to increase the level of play and prevent the sport from disappearing to other more intensive sports with higher levels of emotion?
And why stay with this strategy only with the game of squash? What if we redesigned golf balls, baseballs, soccer balls, and hockey pucks? What if we took an innovative high-tech materials approach using memory material engineering to take all sports to another level? Now, I imagine that there will always be holdouts, those who do not want “their” sport to evolve.
After all, we have seen it with the advent of snowboarding on skis. Many people look at how these sports are played today, and they might say something like; “don’t you dare mess around with the game of baseball,” or hockey, or soccer, or cricket, or any of a number of sports.
Still, we have a lot of hybrid sports that people play for fun, for example Frisbee football. What if we were to play around with some of these sports and some of the teams, and see what we come up with? I think what we might find is that we would have a new interest in sports, new enthusiasts, and more people playing in their spare time, even if it was just at a local park.
If we could keep the game of squash from dying on the vine because fewer and fewer people are playing it these days, that would be a good thing, and let’s face it, when it comes to those other sports, none of us can hit the mark. ball like they do in the professional leagues, but maybe this would give us a better chance of at least knocking one out of the park once in a while. In fact, I hope you will please consider all this and think about it.
