(1962 – )
A man and an idea-that is the heart of Greg Zaff’s simple but possibly unequalled effect on the history of U.S. squash. Greg Zaff, while at Williams, played #1 on both the squash and tennis teams and was the first person ever to be named an All American in both sports. The southpaw then spent seven years on the hardball WPSA tour, reaching a ranking of #2 and winning one major, the 1990 Canadian Open. Afterwards, while pursuing a Masters degree at Harvard, he began thinking about the idea of starting an after-school youth enrichment program for underserved kids based around academic tutoring, community service and squash. In the September 1996 Zaff launched SquashBusters. It quickly expanded to become a seven-year program mentoring over a hundred students annually. In 2003 SquashBusters opened the country’s first-ever urban squash program facility, the $9.4 million, eight-court Badger & Rosen Facility at Northeastern. In July 2005 he founded the National Urban Squash and Education Association to support existing programs and develop new ones-in the fifteen years after he started SquashBusters he helped create eight other official, NUSEA-certified programs and a dozen fledging programs.
