Not long ago I was reading a very interesting sports medicine article in one of the top journals. The article had to do with human muscles, and the filaments between the muscles which allowed for rapid succession of full strength and rest. For instance a runner, or someone doing low weight high repetition curls at 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 upgrade the game of squash, we could create a squash ball with a filament inside which would move around.
Envision this for a second if you might; as you hit the squash ball, and depending on how hard you hit it, the filament would push forward changing the shape of the ball into an airfoil, the shape of the wing. When the ball hit the backboard, the filament would bounce back, and the wing shape would come back at the player. This would make the sport faster, higher paced, and indeed it would be more fun for the players. Is this something we can do to the game of squash to increase the level of play, and keep the sport from dying out due to other more intensive sports with higher excitement levels?
And why stop with this strategy just with the game of squash? What if we redesigned golf balls, baseballs, soccer balls, and hockey pucks? What if we used a high-tech innovative material approach using material memory engineering to take all the sports to another level? Now then, I imagine there will always be the holdouts, those who don’t want “their” sports to evolve.
After all, we’ve seen this with the advent of snowboarding over skis. Many people are set in their ways as to 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 many hybrid sports which people play for fun, Frisbee football for instance. What if we were to tinker around with some of these sports and some of the equipment, and see what we come up with? I think what we might find is we would have new interest in the sports, new enthusiasts, and more people playing in their leisure time even if they were just in a local park.
If we could keep the game of squash from dying on the vine because fewer as fewer people are playing it these days, that would be a good thing, and let’s face, when it comes to those other sports, it none of us can hit the ball like they do in the pro leagues, but maybe this would give us a better chance to at least hit one out of the park once in a while. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
