Monday 24 June 2013

The Rise and Fall of Squash Teams in East of Scotland - Part II

I roughly graphed this in Part 1

Below is the accurate plot for Ladies Squash in East from the beginning in 1973, through the boom years mid-1980's, a mini-boom in 2000 and the gradual decline since then:
From a peak of 27 ladies teams in 3 divisions, we now stand at 14 teams in 3 sparse divisions.
East and West of Scotland are the only two regions to keep their ladies leagues going. Grampian no longer has ladies leagues. Back in my old stomping ground in Cork, ladies play individual leagues.
   Below is a chart which shows Grange Ladies(the thick blue line) closing in on the #1 spot in Div 1 over the last few years. The list of clubs show that 10 no longer exist as ladies teams, out of the 23 that once played. Over and above the 2 Marco's clubs that have been demolished, we no longer have Colinton Castle, Dean, Deer Park, Dunfermline, Hatton, Heriot Watt, Kirkcaldy, Next Generation, Tyne and Stirling Uni fielding ladies teams.

Click on the pictures to enlarge!
The next instalment will chart the rise and fall of men's squash in East.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can't say that I understand all the lines that go all over the place on the graphs but I'd completely forgotten that Stirling University used to play in the East leagues.


And could you remind me when the Grange Squash Club opened please?


My memory seems to be a bit foggy these days.

Thanks,
Richard

GrangeSquashClub said...

Yeah, I am going to do a better graph, this was my first attempt and I packed in too much information. I'm using the ladies to figure out what works best. So when I do the open leagues where the sheer volume of data is much bigger, I'll go straight to the best plots.
Grange opened 1976 with Ghadaffi's right hand man winning our inaugural club championship
Watsons ladies won Div 2 on their debut in 1980 but didn't make it to Div 1 until 1986. But I think the club were instrumental in the foundation of squash in Scotland back in 1936. They had 2 mens teams in the inaugural Div 1 & 2 leagues in 1969!

Anonymous said...

I remember season 1969-70 like it was yesterday .... the glory years of Watsonian squash. No heaters.

Richard