Fordham Names Bryan Patterson Squash Head Coach

For a long time, Fordham squash has filled a position of irrelevancy at our university. Squash was Fordham's red-headed step-child, a team that struggled to be successful and received almost no attention from the community. Fortunately, those days may be changing with the hiring of Bryan Patterson. Patterson has many of the attributes a school should be looking for in an important head coaching hire. Patterson is experienced, intelligent and very familiar with Fordham. He is the man Fordham squash needs to become competitive again.

Patterson, a native of England, has an extremely impressive and lengthy track record. As a player he represented England in a number of national and international championships and was ranked as high as No. 2 in England and No. 16 in the world in the late 1970s. Patterson was the assistant coach for the English Junior Squads for 20 years and served as the director of squash at both the prestigious Heights Casino in Brooklyn from 1994 until 2000 and the CHASS Squash Club in Philadelphia for seven years after that. While at the CHASS Squash Club, Patterson began the High Schools Team Championship, now the largest junior squash team event in the world.

Finally, starting in 2007 and continuing until the present, Patterson has been the director of squash at CitySquash, the Bronx program though which he was introduced to Fordham's program and its players and a position Patterson will still hold on to while he coaches at Fordham part-time.

Patterson, who is taking over for Bob Hawthorne after Hawthorne led the Rams for three decades, says that he took the head coaching position due to his familiarity with Fordham from CitySquash.

"I got to know these players from working with them for a while now, and I know how great of guys they are and how great of a school Fordham is," Patterson said. "I really wanted this job, and the fact that Fordham allowed me to keep my position with CitySquash was very important to me."

While Patterson has a number of both short- and long-term goals he wants to accomplish in his time as head coach, his most immediate goal for the 2010 season is to teach Fordham's players how to effectively play on the team's four beautiful new regulation size squash courts, which will be geared toward the international style of play instead of the North American style that the old courts served.

"This team needs to learn how to play the international style properly," he said. "We're going to spend a lot of time this year, both in practice and in games, working on technique and strategy for success on international courts. This program will find success only when its members are well-versed in how to properly play the game."

     No one could argue that Fordham squash has not been an abject failure for a long time now. The Rams have gone 9-29 in the last three years and it has been much longer since the program has seen any measurable success, partly due to the fact that it had an aging coach in place for way too long.

The squash team receives little attention from the athletic department and from Fordham students and fans. It has also embarrassingly needed to recruit tennis players and other athletes to the team due to lack of interest in the program. Even with the extremely generous assistance of CitySquash, who basically saved our school's program by building Fordham new facilities so they could make use of them and by helping to attract a new head coach to Rose Hill, the Rams seem to be a long way away from becoming a consistently competitive program.

Luckily, Patterson is realistic about the challenges he is going to face at Fordham.

"We want to win, but I know that might be hard to do for a little while," he said. "I would just like to see our players learning the game this year and enjoying themselves out on the court. If we play our best and still lose but enjoy ourselves, that's all I can ask for."

Patterson recognizes the issues the squash program has had with recruiting in recent years but hopes the athletic department will allow him to recruit players for squash in the near future, believing that the benefits Fordham offers should attract players.

"I have a relationship with a lot of talented players from my time coaching," Patterson said. "Fordham's a great academic school and it's in New York City. It offers the best of both worlds. What talented athlete wouldn't want to play here?"

While Patterson has only been officially coaching for about two weeks, his players have already warmed up to him.

"He's had a very large impact," junior Andrew Grosner said. "He has a likeable quality about him that he brings with him everywhere and makes all the guys listen to him and like him as well. Bryan has immediately made us work hard, work on squash-specific drills and has high hopes for us, if not this year, most definitely next year. The team will be very, very improved under him.  If we are allowed to recruit players to play, I see us doing extremely well under Bryan Patterson and his coaching staff in the foreseeable future."

Patterson shares the optimism of Grosner and largely echoed the words of his young charge.

"This program will be much improved very soon," he said. "At some point, I see Fordham becoming one of the better squash programs in the country."