South African squash players will get a chance to compete for valuable world ranking points in the country with the launch of the Assore squash series that will see at least 11 tournaments being staged locally during the year.
The series starts with four satellite events offering $2,000 (about R33,000) prize money for men and women over February and March, before stepping up to four $3,000 (about R50,000) events across April and May.
“This has been a dream of mine for a long, long time,” said former national player Craig van der Wath, the series director, at the launch in Johannesburg on Tuesday.
“The world rankings are very important and as such we have a starter series of tournaments, four tournaments before the end of March,” he said, adding the first satellite event would kick off on February 12.
Most of the action will take place at the Parkview squash club.
“These tournaments are important for our players in South Africa to start their way on the world rankings, earn their first points and get into the bigger tournaments that we’ll be running later in the year,” Van der Wath added.
The plan is to have 50% South African representation in all tournaments — the more South Africans scoring more points means they could stage higher-ranking tournaments while keeping the local-to-foreign ratio at 50%.
“The possibilities that this whole series unlocks is just immense,” said Squash South Africa president Blaar Coetzee. “You can get access to the big tournaments [abroad] and then it’s worthwhile to travel and spend the money on that.”
South Africa has only two players ranked in the top 100 in the world — Dewald van Niekerk, 71st on the men’s list, and Hayley Ward, 66th among the women.
Teagan Russell, one of the top women in the country who is 200th in the world, said it was difficult to break into the international circuit.
“Just speaking to Dewald, one of the big things is it’s an extremely lonely journey when you have to constantly be away from home, away from your coaches, you’re kind of put on the back foot because you’re in other people’s territories.
“Bringing that series of tournaments here is absolutely incredible … For myself and other Squash South Africa players, to be able to get our rankings high enough so that we can also enter tournaments overseas, go and compete, we haven’t had that opportunity.
“Now we do.”
Gaining much-needed experience could also prove useful for the country’s Olympic aspirations, with squash making its debut at Los Angeles 2028.
It should also help the men and women improve their standards for the world team championships in South Korea in December.
At the last championships in 2024, the men ended 16th and the women 18th.
With Egypt being the top nation in the world, South Africa can’t simply rely on being the top nation in Africa to get to the Olympics, as it has in some other codes.
South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc) president Barry Hendricks, a former president of Squash SA, said they were going to push for at least two teams from Africa to represent the continent at the 2028 Games.
The qualifying criteria for the Olympics have not yet been finalised.
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