CEO Message - 2024 Year in Review

It has been another significant year for Squash in Australia, with much forward progress and the platform being well and truly laid for the years ahead in a number of different areas.

Our premier event, the Squash Australian Open, was elevated back to the PSA World Tour earlier this year and while plans for a centrepiece court in Sydney’s CBD fell foul of the weather, the tournament nonetheless was a huge success and has an even brighter future. 

The event will go from Bronze to Gold status in 2025, making it one of the feature events of the PSA Squash Tour. The Tournament will call Brisbane’s South Bank Piazza home, and we recently announced Easy Times Brewing Co. as our new naming rights partner. If you’re looking for any last-minute Christmas gifts, there is nothing better than tickets to the event next March!

We were also able to lock in Melbourne as host of the Australian Junior Open for the next three years thanks to the support of the Victorian Government. The AJO continues to be extremely popular for not only our juniors, but those from around the region with the quality of international players taking this event to another level. We had record participation in 2024 and look forward to even more growth in the next three years.

We also announced the Australian National Championships would call Queensland home until 2027 with the support of the City of Moreton Bay.

The World Squash Federation announced in October that Australia will have the opportunity to host the World Masters Championships in 2026. More than 60 Australians joined 1000+ entrants in Amsterdam for this year’s event with Geoff Davenport and Sue Hillier adding more world titles to their impressive trophy cabinets, and it will be wonderful to welcome the event back to Australia for the first time since 2001.

Looking even further ahead, last month we launched our LA 2028 campaign. It was an exciting occasion, particularly for those athletes who can now dream of being Olympians. Thank you to AOC President, Ian Chesterman AM for attending and formally welcoming us into the Australian Olympic Family.

The event delivered contrasting emotions to the news in October that Squash had been cut from a dramatically reduced Commonwealth Games program at Glasgow 2026. While we certainly understand the reasons surrounding the announcement, it remains disappointing given how instrumental the Commonwealth Games has been for our elite players over the last quarter of a century. We thank the CGA for all the work they did in securing the short-term future of the Games and look forward to returning to the program in 2030.

In July, 12 players represented Australia at the World Junior Championships in Houston. Hannah Slyth was the highest place finisher in the individual event, with our women’s team finishing 11th and our men’s team 12th.

Earlier in the year Australia won back the Junior Trans-Tasman Test Series at the end of a big block of competition in Melbourne which included the AJO and Oceania Junior Championships.

The final competition for our national teams this year took place in Hong Kong two weeks ago when the Men’s and Women’s World Team Championships were held concurrently for the first time. Our women matched their 2022 result with 11th place, however, early pool losses saw our men’s team miss the knockout stage.

Off the court, the new membership model that was launched in 2023 continued to evolve with Clubs & STM’s working hard to ensure all participants register to MySquashAUS. Integration with the international ratings system Squash Levels and the successful testing and implementation of the competition module means we will complete the transition to MySquashAUS from 1 January 2025. This has been a significant reform for the sport over the last 2 years, and now provides us with the integrated online tools to manage the sport more efficiently and effectively at all levels.

Our national participation program - Squash Stars - continues to be rolled out in schools and we are ready to push forward with the next phase of introducing it to clubs and centres thanks to investment from the Australian Sports Commission through the Play Well grant program.

We also recently received a boost in funding from the Australian Sports Commission and the Australian Institute of Sport, to deliver on our 2032+ High Performance Strategy - Inspiring Sustainable Success. The investment is a great vote of confidence from the AIS in our strategy which will see the National Performance Centre on the Gold Coast play an even more important role in supporting and preparing our athletes with Olympic ambitions.

Our Annual Awards have now moved to March each year to align with the festival of Squash at the Squash Australian Open. However, November still presented us with an amazing night in Melbourne when Geoff Hunt was elevated to Legend status in the Sport Australia Hall of Fame.

While Geoff’s record is well-known to those in the sport, this endorsement from SAHOF shows just how esteemed his feats are considered across the Australian sporting landscape with just 50 other athletes having ever been named Legends. On behalf of the entire Australian squash community: Congratulations Geoff.

To the Board and Staff at Squash Australia as well as the states, territories, clubs, centres and our valued partners, thank you for all your hard work and support throughout the past 12 months. I hope everyone is able to take some time to rest and enjoy time with loved ones in the coming weeks.

Robert Donaghue
Squash Australia CEO