Cardiff Squash & Racketball Club: History, Juniors & a New Era

Cardiff Squash & Racketball Club has been around since 1937, which gives it more history than most clubs could dream of.

It has hosted the Welsh Open, produced generations of players and was founded by Maurice Turnbull, a man who managed to be very good at squash, rugby, hockey and cricket all at once.

Which feels a little unnecessary, frankly.

But that mix of history, ambition and sporting obsession still suits the club today.

Because Cardiff Squash & Racketball Club is not standing still.

The courts have been improved. Membership is growing. The club is busier. Junior squash is back. Young coaches are coming through.

For a club closing in on 90 years old, there is a lot of new energy around the place.

And that makes it a very good time to take a closer look.

A remarkable beginning

Cardiff Squash & Racketball Club was established in 1937 by Maurice Turnbull and a group of fellow squash enthusiasts.

Turnbull's sporting career alone gives the club quite an origin story.

He was the first Welsh Open squash champion, represented Wales at rugby union and hockey and played first-class cricket for Glamorgan before going on to represent England at Test level.

He was killed in action in Normandy in 1944, aged just 38.

His connection with Cardiff Squash & Racketball Club has never completely disappeared. Members of the Turnbull family still play at the club today, almost 90 years after Maurice helped establish it.

The club itself has changed considerably in that time.

It began with two courts, a third was added before the Second World War and a fourth glass-back court, complete with viewing gallery, followed in 1978.

Cardiff became member-owned in 1955 and remains so today.

For many years it was also home to the Welsh Open, giving the club a prominent place within the history of squash in Wales.

That history is clearly important to Cardiff, but the club has not allowed it to become an excuse for standing still.

A period of real change

A new committee took over in January 2024, with Rich Tailby becoming chairman, and set about modernising the club.

The changes since then have been substantial.

Three of the four courts have been redeveloped, including the installation of new glass doors. The changing rooms have been refurbished, the gym improved and an infrared sauna added. The bar has also been upgraded, while further work is being carried out on the kitchen and physio room.

There has been plenty happening away from the building work too.

The number of events and competitions being held at the club has increased significantly and membership has grown by around 50%.

That growth is probably the clearest indication that the work being done is having an effect.

Improved courts and facilities matter, of course, but clubs ultimately live or die by whether people want to spend time there. Cardiff appears to have created some real momentum.

One of the biggest jobs facing the new committee, however, was rebuilding something the club had been without for nearly ten years.

A junior section.

Starting again with junior squash

Junior squash returned to Cardiff in 2025.

There are now 18 junior members, with more than 20 youngsters having taken part in the Friday coaching sessions since the programme began.

Those numbers are still relatively modest, but that is almost beside the point. After a decade without a junior section, Cardiff is essentially starting again and putting the foundations in place properly.

The Friday programme currently consists of a 45-minute Mini Squash session followed by 90 minutes of Junior Squash, with around five to eleven players typically attending across the two sessions.

One of the best things about the set-up is how easy Cardiff has made it for children to have a go.

The sessions are open to anyone aged between four and 16. Parents do not have to be members and children do not have to join the club before attending.

They do not need to arrive with a brand-new racket either.

Rackets, balls and other equipment can be provided, meaning a child can effectively turn up in sports clothes and try squash without their parents having to spend money on equipment before knowing whether they will enjoy it.

That might sound like a small detail, but it removes one of the easiest barriers to entry.

The first aim is simply to get children on court and make sure they want to come back the following week.

Learn, Play, Compete, Belong

Cardiff has built its junior programme around four principles:

Learn. Play. Compete. Belong.

The first three are fairly obvious.

Players need to learn the game, spend plenty of time actually playing it and eventually be given opportunities to compete.

The fourth is arguably the most important.

Cardiff wants its juniors to feel that they are members of the wider club rather than children who happen to attend a coaching session once a week.

That means creating a route into everything else happening at the club.

Coaching is organised in roughly six-week development blocks, with additional weekend development sessions taking place around every six weeks. Those sessions allow more time to work on areas such as matchplay, tactics and team activities.

The club also uses Off The Wall Squash skills certificates to give youngsters a sense of progress without turning coaching into a series of formal assessments.

Junior Player of the Month awards, development awards and themed sessions have all been introduced too. One of those has included Show Racism the Red Card, using the coaching environment to talk about subjects beyond simply winning matches and improving technique.

It gives the programme a bit more personality than simply running drills every Friday afternoon.

Giving juniors somewhere to go

The real test of any junior programme is what happens when players improve.

It is relatively straightforward to run beginner coaching. Keeping youngsters involved when they start wanting more competition is much harder.

Cardiff has therefore tried to create a clear route through the club.

A player might begin on a Friday night, move into the additional development sessions, enter Squash Wales competitions, join the club's box leagues and then progress towards events such as the Cardiff Junior Open and eventually team squash.

Some of the current juniors are already beginning to make that progression.

The aim is not necessarily to turn every four-year-old who walks through the door into an elite squash player.

It is to give them enough opportunities that, if they fall in love with the sport, there is always a next step available.

For squash generally, that is hugely important.

The sport does not just need more juniors trying the game. It needs more of them still playing five, ten or twenty years later.

Young coaches getting their opportunity too

Cardiff is also using the junior programme to help develop coaches.

The programme is overseen by Head Coach Nic Birt, who has considerable experience within both Cardiff and Welsh squash.

He is supported by a coaching group that includes Jonathan Callaghan, Archie Turnbull, Evan Davies-Clarke, Archie Davies-Clarke and Declan Cottrell.

Archie Turnbull is a particularly nice link to the club's history.

Having come through Cardiff as a talented junior player, he is now a Level 2 coach helping another generation take its first steps in the game, continuing the Turnbull family's association with the club.

Evan and Archie Davies-Clarke arrived by a different route. Neither came through Cardiff's old junior section, but both have been coached and mentored by Nic and are now involved in delivering sessions themselves.

Having younger coaches alongside more experienced figures such as Nic has worked well.

For the juniors, there are coaches relatively close to their own age who they can relate to and look up to. For the coaches, it gives them practical experience and a chance to develop within the sport.

It is another small part of building something sustainable rather than relying on one person to do everything.

The Cardiff Junior Open returns

The next big date in the calendar is 3 October 2026, when the Cardiff Junior Open returns.

The tournament will be run as a graded event, matching juniors against players of a similar standard and giving them several competitive matches during the day.

That is particularly useful for newer players.

Their first experience of tournament squash should not be travelling somewhere, being drawn against one of the strongest players in the country, losing heavily and going home.

Graded events give youngsters a much better chance of playing meaningful matches and learning how to compete.

For Cardiff, bringing the Junior Open back also feels like another sign of how far things have moved in a relatively short time.

A club that had no junior section for almost a decade now has regular coaching, a development pathway, young coaches coming through and its own junior tournament returning to the calendar.

There is still plenty of work to do, and the club would be the first to admit that.

But the direction of travel is difficult to miss.

Nearly 90 years on

There are not many squash clubs that can trace their history back to 1937.

Fewer still can point to a founder whose sporting career included international rugby, hockey, squash and Test cricket.

Cardiff has every reason to be proud of that past.

What is encouraging, though, is that the club appears equally interested in what happens next.

The courts are improving. The facilities are improving. More people are joining. Events are returning and a junior programme is beginning to take root again.

And that is exactly why OLIVER is delighted to be involved with Cardiff Squash & Racketball Club as its equipment partner.

For us, supporting racket sports has never just been about the players already competing at the highest level. It is also about the clubs, coaches and volunteers doing the less glamorous work every week: opening the doors, putting rackets into children's hands and giving people a place where they can discover the sport.

What Cardiff Squash & Racketball Club has got right is that it feels like a club with a past, not a club living in one.

The history matters.

So do the people who are there now.

The juniors learning the game. The coaches giving up their time. The members playing league matches, box matches and social squash. The people in the bar explaining exactly why they would have won if their backhand had been working.

That is a proper squash club.

Nearly 90 years after it began, Cardiff Squash & Racketball Club is still giving people a place to play, compete, improve and belong.

And judging by the direction it is heading, the best years might not all be behind it.