Northern School squash festivals
Northern recently completed their annual Autumn programme of visits to local first schools to introduce squash to 7 and 8 year olds. All nine state first schools visited are located within 2 miles of Northern and are feeder schools into the three local middle schools and then eventually Gosforth Academy.
During the taster session at the schools , Northern's coaches teach around 500 children the principles of eye / hand co ordination with lots of fun exercises. The most promising 50 boys and girls are invited back to the club to experience proper squash at our two festivals.
This process has proven to be very successful in the past … introducing squash to the likes of Michael Mattimore, Josie Barker , Andrew Shipley and Megan Evans to name but a few. In fact it has been so successful that of the 10 girls that have represented the county at under 13 and 15 this season , eight of them have been a product of this process !
Many of the children that attend the club's junior festivals, then book onto the club's junior courses and also support the local Dunlop challenge series of junior tournaments.
With such an early start in the sport , many of these children are very good players by the time they reach Gosforth Academy and the school has reaped the reward of it's support for this initiative by winning multiple national school squash titles in recent years. Hopefully there will be some new superstars of junior squash in these pictures of this year`s festivals.
