More Than Just A Ranking is a series where we get a personal insight into squash players about more than just who they are on court
In the latest episode, we speak with German player Saskia Beinhard- about how she got into squash, squash in Germany and her military background.
“So I’m Saskia Beinhard, I’m from Germany and I’m 23 years old.
I’ve been playing squash for 15 years now. I got into squash through my mom, she used to be a hobby player when she was younger. She wanted me to try out some different sports.
Then she brought me to the squash court and then there was a squash trainer that saw me and asked me if I want to join the training sessions- and that’s how I got into it.
[On Squash in Germany] So my feeling is that we have more good players than we used to have in the past few years. But what is missing at the moment is like the real top players.
I mean, we still have Raphi (Raphael Kandra) who is obviously a top player, but like for women, I wish that we could have a top player at the top 20, top ten. So I’m obviously working on that.
I think that players are missing actually we need some more juniors to come up and to train very well and the junior work is missing a little bit.
I feel like everybody’s doing a lot about it, but I think that’s something that happens in other sports as well, that just like juniors do not enjoy playing different kind of sports and they enjoy other things that they used to do like ten or 20 years ago.
I think that’s kind of the problem: to make them get into the sport easier, probably to make them see and realize more that there is training that they can do.
I feel like we have a good national team, so the top four are actually good. I’m happy about that. To also to see that three of us are really young and really working on themselves to improve. So I feel like the future can be bright for us.
Squash is for men and women. I feel like the women’s game has improved a lot in the past years, In every tournament and myself, I really enjoy watching women squash as well because it’s so different to the to the men’s squash.
Nicol David was my biggest inspiration growing up: I feel like she has made the biggest change in women’s squash.
She made women’s squash so athletic and so physical, so this has definitely been an inspiration. I’m really happy about that because I start loving the physical aspect about women’s squash.
I’m really lucky to be in the military in Germany. So they kind of support the athletes in every different sport. So since that, I can train professionally and I can really focus on squash.
They would they would always say that squash is like my main job. After squash, they would probably offer me a job in the military training. So yeah, it’s a very good opportunity as an athlete, but also afterwards.”
