Mauricha Taylor knows how to manage the game when she plays touch football with friends on an empty field near her house just west of downtown along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
A sixth-grader at Booker T. Washington Middle School, Mauricha takes the quarterback position every chance she gets. She is someone who likes to run the show, a youngster with dreams of becoming a pastry chef.
Like a lot of kids in Baltimore — the ones from the wide strata below the private and prep school set — Mauricha had never heard of a game called squash.
And then Abby Markoe showed up at Booker T. with a program called SquashWise along with a young woman from Morgan State University, who had used the game as a path to college.
Together they made some rah-rah about funny-looking racquets and a ball that bounces more quickly than those fuzzy, lime green ones you see on tennis courts.
About 90 kids turned out to watch the introduction. That was several months ago.
Now Booker T. Washington has its own team of 16 players, SquashWise has an initial budget of $145,000, and Markoe — who landed in Baltimore to pursue a master’s degree in public health at Johns Hopkins University — is known as “the squash lady.”
The team practices at the Meadow Mill Athletic Club, located in Mount Washington, about 3 miles from the middle school. Meadow Mill has donated court time to the program.
And it is supported by local businesspeople and squash enthusiasts such as Charlie Wise, a renewable energy consultant who chairs the SquashWise board of directors. (The name of the program is coincidental. The Baltimore group was going to call itself SquashWorks, but a club in Utah already had the name.)
“Squash isn’t waning with its traditional base, it’s actually on an upswing. But these [inner-city] programs expand its reach,” said Wise, who played varsity lacrosse for the University of Maryland, going to the Final Four with the Terps as a freshman in 1991.
“This is a good way for these kids to work with each other and to compete for scholarships to top-flight schools.”
To stay on the team, the students must maintain passing grades and stay clear of disciplinary problems for the privilege of smacking a ball against a wall in heated competition.
“Despite the fact that all of these kids were beginners and we were in a huge gymnasium and not a squash court, they did surprisingly well,” said Markoe, the executive director of SquashWise, who herself picked up the game in middle school in Lawrenceville, N.J., outside Princeton. “Some of them were naturals — ready to start hitting on a real court with another student.”
But more than athletic ability, Markoe was looking for enthusiasm. “That’s the No. 1 thing,” said Markoe, adding that the kids in the program receive both academic tutoring and support in social skills as part of the team.
In making good use of her natural enthusiasm — the kind Markoe believes necessary for squash to be a stepping stone to a better life — Mauricha has taken to the game with the funny name.
“You put your mind to it, and you know that you can do it,” said Mauricha, who plans to attend the National Academy Foundation School in Federal Hill after graduating from Booker T. Washington.
The first field trip for the squash team was Pam Shriver’s 23rd annual tennis exhibition, held at the 1st Mariner Arena on Nov. 21. There, Serena Williams took on Elena Dementieva of Russia. Asked how squash is different from the game conquered by Serena and her sister Venus, Mauricha said that the ball is smaller, and instead of hitting it over a net toward your opponent, you whack it against a wall.
The speed and cunning it takes to do that well, said William Bailey, Booker T. Washington’s principal, is a key to why the kids have embraced the game.
“Chasing the ball at a high rate of speed while keeping up their grades is the equivalent of the fast pace of their lives,” Bailey said. “They know they have to keep up.”
Taralyn Gonzalez — the program coordinator for SquashWise — began playing in a Harlem, N.Y., program called “Street Squash.”
The Harlem group — along with similar programs in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Haven, Conn. — is one of 10 urban squash projects established around the country in the wake of SquashBusters, started in Boston in 1995 by Greg Zaff, who starred in the sport at Williams College.
The National Urban Squash and Education Association, which recently selected Baltimore’s SquashWise as its “star program,” asserts that 93 percent of all kids who graduate from an urban squash program go on to college.
In a city like Baltimore, where educational advocacy groups gauged the public high school dropout rate this year at about 65 percent, nonprofit programs like SquashWise are viewed as miraculous.
“When you have a small program with a high mentor-to-student ratio … when you have people playing the game showing interest in teaching kids the game, you’re going to do well,” said Doug Hoffberger, vice president of the SquashWise board. “Squash is the way we get them in the door to tutoring programs.”
Just like Mauricha, Gonzalez showed up at tryouts when the game was introduced at her middle school and “fell in love with it.”
She played through high school and is now in her junior year at Morgan, studying for a degree in business.
“I was one of the first students in the country to be in this type of program. … I believe in it because I am a product of its success,” Gonzalez said.
Rafael Alvarez can be reached at [email protected].
