The YMCA in Los Alamos was originally built with six courts to support raquetball, handball, and squash. There were originally three squash courts (the smaller "American style singles" variant that is reasonably unpopular in modern squash) and three larger courts appropriate for raquetball and four-wall handball.

Several years ago, one of the squash courts was euthanized to make room for the indoor climbing wall. Last year, a second squash court was converted into a "multi-purpose room" which basically meant they shoved about 15 exercise bikes in it, rendering it useless for squash. This left the squash players with a single court, which was problematic since there are probably more squash players in Los Alamos than raquetball and handball players combined.

The solution was to take up a collection, funded almost entirely by the squash players, to rennovate one of the three raquetball/handball courts into a sliding-wall convertible court which could be re-sized from its regular size down to a standard squash length (for singles games, though the court is 1' narrower than a standard singles squash court). For the last several months this rennovation has been taking place, temporarily leaving only a single squash court and two handball/raquetball courts available. As a result, there has been a serious traffic jam for prime court time.

The YMCA has a reservation system for courts, allowing us to call ahead and get a court assigned to us for our desired time. Like everyone else who isn't retired, we wanted to use the 17:30-18:30 block for our twice-weekly handball games. With just the two courts useable for handball, the competition between us and the raquetball players for court time was intense. It ended up that we were calling the YMCA the moment they started taking reservations for the day in question, which in this case was 9am the previous day.

Enter the convertible court, which is now being fought over by all three sports. It turns out that, in order to relieve phone conjestion at the YMCA front desk, the reservation start time for squash players was set to 8:30am. This wasn't a problem because they had their own courts. Now that we share a court... they haven't rectified the discrepancy between the times and, as a result of fierce competition for court times, the squash players always get the good court.

After a scheduling error on the Y's part had both our handball game and a raquetball game scheduled for the same court and time slot this evening, and the handball players lost in arbitration... we were left in a really frustrating position. Both standard raquetball/handball courts were filled with raquetball games, the convertible court was filled with a squash game, and the squash-only court was empty.

I asked the squash players if they would be willing to move back to the regular squash court so that the handball players could play but my request was summarily denied for two reasons. The first was that the old squash court was not regulation size and all of the good squash players in town had vowed never to use it again (nevermind that he also told me about the new court being too narrow). The second reason was that the squash players had ponied up all the cash for the convertible court rennovation and they thus deserved preferential access to it.

I'm thinking the moral of this story might be that squash players are pricks.