Ville Leppanen, Head Coach at Blackheath Squash Club since 2015, works in the music business when not on court. A native Finn, he once sang Finland’s national anthem at Anfield before a Euro Qualifier between England and Finland. His coaching philosophy is to help people find more tools to increase their enjoyment of the game.
Squash – Pinball or Chess on Legs?
Ville Leppanen • February 27, 2020
Ville Leppanen - Head Coach - Blackheath Squash Club
Squash, they say, is chess on legs!
With only a split second in which to decide the next strategic move, it's quite an extreme physical form of chess. Others see it as a hacking contest where the ball must be mercilessly bludgeoned until something gives. Irrespective of playing style, everyone who's been on court will agree on just what great fun squash is. It’s such an easy sport to pick up. Hitting a ball against a wall is a great way to break a sweat.
For a beginner, there isn’t a lot of chess involved. At a very basic level, just connecting with the ball is challenging enough. However, as you start progressing, the game, too, slowly begins to reveal its fascinating secrets.
At first you just think about getting the ball to the front wall for a good return. It's such a satisfying feeling to be able to do it repeatedly. Then you begin to purposefully focus on hitting the ball to its intended destination: a specific square meter on the floor in the back or front corners.
It leads to the pleasing realisation that the boast you've already hit, mostly by accident, can be used to move the ball to yet more destinations on the court.
Then the big one: you notice just how high the front wall is and how using its height allows you to alleviate pressure and get back in the rally. What inexorably follows is the heureka moment of discovering the cubic meters that fill the air inside the court. You can move the ball through all that space in so many ways.
The ball is really active now and you're making it work for you, expressing your creative flair as a player.
All the while your movement in and out of shots has improved. Better footwork makes you a difficult player to break down. Different velocities of shot come into your game. There really is no need to hit violently all the time. You begin to move faster into shots you hit on the rise. Or you hold your shots longer.
Mindgames? We don't do that sort of thing at Blackheath, do we? We do? Maybe, but we certainly don't block or shout loudly or throw our rackets around in disgust...
When coaching it's revealing to help a player realise how a perceived weakness is almost always fixed by focusing on what happens before it. Inaccurate, loose hitting is the result of poor racket head control, which is caused by inadequate racket preparation, made worse by ill-timed movement into the shot, which was probably caused by the bad movement off the previous shot, which, probably was made difficult by a loose preceding shot.
The ability to think about what your shot does to you, not just to your opponent, is the key to being able to stretch time on court. It's surprising just how elastic time is and how shot selection stretches and shrinks the basic unit of ”Squash Mean Time“: the time available to you so that you can get to where you hit the ball from and back to a controlling position on the T.
Correctly calculating the available options - fast/slow, hard/soft, high/low, straight/angle, back/front etc. - ought to stretch SMT in your favour. It will win you matches.
That said, even if you tin it in the end, please don’t swear. Smile. Squash is just a fun game. Besides, there’s a small moral victory in every shot, as long as you hit it hard or harder...!
Congratulations to Alex Booth who won the 2025 Handicap Tournament, and to Abhishek Jaywant for making it through to the finals. Alex was the second seed in the tournament and Abhishek the top seed with Alex having a -17 and Abhishek -18, so the games started at -1 to 0. Alex won a close first game 11/9 but Abhishek fought to win the second game 11/4. Alex went on to win the next two games and win the match by three games to one. Well done to Alex and Abhishek and to the fifty players that entered the tournament. A big thanks also to Alex for organising this tournament which was held for the first time since pre-covid times in 2019.
Club Night is now scheduled for every first and third Friday of the month at 19:30-21:00
Junior Squash sessions - Saturday mornings @ Blackheath Squash
