Women’s Squash Week is an international campaign that aims to celebrate and raise the profile of female squash.
PSA Foundation are proud to champion this key awareness week, and a core part of our work is empowering women and girls to participate in squash.
We speak with Nour El Tayeb about her incredible comeback after becoming a mother, the challenges she faced on her comeback (before her retirement in August 2024), and the importance of creating easier spaces for mothers to come back into our sport.
At first it was exciting, because it’s a new challenge. It’s no expectations whatsoever [on Tour] from me and I’m just happy to be out there competing, you know, and I think because of this mindset and obviously some good squash ability and support from my family, I came back fast enough.
In the first few months of my come back, I was, in my opinion, everyone else’s a mother coming back.
My usual days as a player and mother would be: I’d wake up, drop Farida off at a nursery. So I wake up to have to race to get her dressed. I know it sounds silly, but you know, to get her dressed and and convince her every day. Every day we have to convince her.
Your brain is focused on someone else the whole day. As much as I think this is great for me as a person, as a squash player, it takes a lot from mental capacity or energy capacity.
When I spoke to Natalie (Grinham), she helped me organize the day better and accept that I’ll have to put this amount of hours, then with working with energy she told me try to be more consistent.
On the squash court, after giving birth, the first few months of playing were fun because it’s new, it’s a nice challenge. But then a few months into it’s just very exhausting.
With the lack of sleep piling up over the days, over the months, it’s just very exhausting.
I wanted to finish squash on good terms. You know, when I the day I saw that I was pregnant, I cried. I was happy, I was grateful, but I wasn’t ready for my career to be over this way.
But I think having a child helped me play more freely in a way because as women, we have a deadline to have a child.
Having support is a very big deal for mothers and I think a lot of women obviously postpone it till end of their careers to have the a child because they think it is it will hurt their career.
But I think if we can manage to portray or show that it is doable to come back, I think it will help more women make the decision a little bit easier to have a child.
