They’re breaking ground Wednesday on a $10 million Pittsburgh sports complex that’s not only about the sport.
The sport is squash, in which two or four players wield rackets to whack a small hollow rubber ball around an indoor four-walled court.
Steel City Squash introduced the sport in 2015 to Pittsburgh fourth and fifth graders as part of the Squash and Education Alliance, an international network of programs that link the discipline and determination needed in the sport to boost academic achievement.
It works. Steel City Squash now serves kids through 12th grade and they have a 100% high school graduation rate and 100% college matriculation rate.
With the new center in the city’s Larimer neighborhood, which is to open in early 2024, SCS will be able to triple the number of students in its program to 120.
“We wanted to provide world-class facilities to our students,” says Brad Young, the executive director of SCS, which is working on the new center with The Larimer Consensus Group, Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh and Chatham University.
In fact, Chatham’s varsity squash teams will practice and compete there while also coaching SCS players. The Chatham men’s team is ranked 11th in the nation, and the women’s team is ranked 19th.
Chatham has two courts on campus, where SCS now has two students attending — two of that original cohort who were in elementary school in 2015.
SCS currently offers its services, completely free, to about 50 students from several partner schools around the city. They use classrooms at the University of Pittsburgh’s Trees Hall and practice squash in outdated American hardball squash courts tucked away in Pitt’s Fitzgerald Field House.
The vacant ground to be ceremonially broken at 4 p.m. Wednesday — in fact, construction already began on the site — is at 624 Larimer Ave., between Shetland and Joseph streets. SCS says the 19,000-square-foot facility, designed by GBBN, will be the largest of its kind between Philadelphia and Chicago.
The Larimer Education and Squash Complex will feature eight squash courts, including a glass-walled championship court, along with classrooms and a college and career center. The courts will be open to the public, too, when they’re not being used by students in nearby schools that SCS intends to, well, court.
Construction has begun after three years of fundraising of more than $9 million by the SCS board, Larimer Consensus Group leadership from several foundations and other sources.
A public fundraising campaign has been launched to raise the approximately $700,000 more that’s needed will begin soon, Young said.
In the meantime, SCS also is prepping for its big annual fundraiser, the Steel City Cup “fundraising competition and racquets tournament,” to be held on Saturday, April 29, at Pittsburgh Golf Club in Squirrel Hill. This is the ninth and will be the last, Young points out, to not be held at the Larimer complex.
Learn more at https://steelcitysquash.org.
Bob, a feature writer and editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is currently on strike and serving as interim editor of the Pittsburgh Union Progress. Contact him at bbatz@unionprogress.com.
