By Kalle Oakes,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – Squash courts show up in the darnedest places.

Why, just take a journey off the Maine Turnpike to 56 Alfred Plourde Parkway, one weighty drive and one pitching wedge away from the giant hole that’s becoming a Wal-Mart distribution center, and you might notice the one-year-old Bates College squash complex.

If all else fails, look for the sliding doors that represent barren loading docks. Bates’ bustling auditorium used to be a FedEx warehouse.

Inside, the back wall is a world tour in photographs you’d swear were retouched. There’s a glass-encased, lighted court strategically placed about 1,000 feet from the Pyramids of Giza. Games being played smack-dab in the middle of New York City’s Grand Central Station and Boston’s Symphony Hall, too.

Amazing stuff, and can’t you just picture it?

Um, actually, the truth is, no you can’t. Most of us don’t have the foggiest idea what squash is, other than the occasional vegetable of the day at the greasy spoon up the street.

“It’s really a sport of the future,” said John Illig, a native of Rochester, N.Y., who has coached the Bates women for nine years, the men four. “And right now, nobody knows about it. We can go on a road trip, stop for a meal on the way home and they’ve never heard of squash.”

There are 30 women’s teams and 45 men’s teams playing college squash in the United States. That’s quite a feat, considering that the sport isn’t sanctioned by the NCAA. More impressive, still, when you consider that not a single public high school in the country is playing the nearly 200-year-old sport.

Most participating schools hail from the Ivy League or, as is the case with Bates, Bowdoin and Colby, the New England Small College Athletic Conference. Military schools and traditional women’s colleges also play the game.

But now even Notre Dame, Stanford and Duke are forming teams and building courts.

“If Duke goes varsity and builds a facility bigger than this,” said Illig, his voice echoing slightly in the converted delivery headquarters, “the sport is really is going to explode.”

Swimming against mainstream

Squash and lawn tennis evolved from the same ancestor. Kings constructed enclosed recreation rooms within castles and invented a game that incorporated both a net and walls. It was also played at the other end of the social spectrum, in prisons.

The walls eventually came down, and tennis became an outdoor, spectator-driven endeavor. Squash remained an upper-crusty sport of royalty and languished in anonymity. It traveled to British satellite countries but vanished from the radar screen in America.

Squash lost even more luster in the 1930s when it unwittingly spawned the more accessible sport of racquetball.

You can walk into a health club in almost any major city and find a racquetball court. Now ask Illig where someone from the Lewiston-Auburn can go to play squash.

“Nowhere, and that’s the problem,” said the coach. “You have to go to (a health club in) Portland. Bowdoin has a summer camp, which we don’t have yet.”

Or you could make the right connections and earn an invitation to the Bates court. It isn’t open to the public, mostly due to liability and proper footwear issues. But Illig says community members do play here.

Herb Bunker helped found the Bates program in the 1980s and was the first coach of the Bobcats’ club team. He remembers a location on Minot Avenue in Auburn where doctors and lawyers pooled their resources to construct a makeshift squash complex.

“It was just big enough for one court, showers and a little balcony,” Bunker said. “They went over to Bowdoin, asked if they could measure their court and built this thing. The place was eventually torn down.

“(Building squash courts) is a tough thing to make work. You just don’t have enough people who play.”

Like tennis, sort of

If you’ve played tennis, you probably would adapt easily to squash. The racket is roughly the same length with a smaller head, designed to hit a rubbery ball that’s less than two inches in diameter. That ball bounces truer, higher, as it warms up during play.

Once the ball is served, the rally continues until one player fails to return the ball to the front wall before it bounces twice. Matches are best-of-five games, and it takes nine points to win a game.

“It’s not uncommon to see 40, 50 or 60-shot rallies,” Illig said. “And after one rally ends, you just pick up the ball and play the next point.”

Illig grew up as a public high school student, playing tennis. He has decided there is no comparison.

“They took a one-hour tape from Wimbledon at some point in 1995 or ’96. It was Stefan Edberg and Boris Becker, something like that,” he said. “They determined how much of that hour was actual time spent playing tennis, and it was seven minutes. The milliseconds it takes to ace, and then it’s 30 to 40 seconds of walking around and tightening the strings and changeovers and missed first serves. If you filmed an hour here, you’d have 53 or 54 minutes of play. It’s a grueling workout.”

Players say that grind is an addiction.

“I find it really exciting. For me, it’s pretty relaxing,” said Bates freshman Ricardo Weisskopf of El Salvador. “When I come here and play, I forget about everything else, which is good because of the pressure in school. You have to have something to be relaxed.”

“I played squash, cricket, rugby and field hockey,” said Sean Wilkinson, a freshman from Zimbabwe who took up the sport at age 11 and was nationally ranked as a prep school player in the U.S. “This is more involved on an individual basis. If you do something wrong, you have no one to blame but yourself.”

What’s not to love?

With action covering all five courts and noise reverberating off the freshly painted walls and newly carpeted concrete floors, the atmosphere at a Bates home squash match can be electrifying.

It’s interactive, too. Illig says there’s a certain kinship in being locked in a 21-foot-wide cage with another person, sweating with them, hearing them curse occasionally.

“It’s just a really nice sport where you can see all the action up close,” Illig said.

That’s if you ever have a chance to watch the action.

How far down the ladder is squash? Ballroom dancing, synchronized swimming and table tennis have been Olympic sports. Squash is not.

Demand dictates that decision. Television triggers demand. And squash televises terribly.

“You know all the stuff they did with the hockey pucks, with the flame behind it and all that? They tried that with squash,” Illig said. “They thought of everything. Blue-tinted courts with a white ball, for instance. It’s just not like beach volleyball, with the women in bikinis and the dancers, where everyone wants to see it.”

Squash has enjoyed greater success in trying to expand its snob appeal.

Illig said that the influx of foreign players who played the game recreationally as children has lightened the mood on college teams.

Apologists for the game have begun youth programs in New York City and Boston. Squash Busters introduces the sport to public school children who spend their afternoons playing on the courts at Northeastern University.

One Squash Busters alumnus, Guillermo Moronta, played at Bates last season.

“Now they’re coming up at a young age,” said Bunker, “just like other kids playing basketball.”

Of course, it’s never too late to take up squash. Illig remembers attending a Pro Tour event in Rochester with his high school tennis buddies and having his jaw drop to the floor.

He converted in college.

“It’s an excellent game at a high level,” Illig said, “because conditioning is so important. But then also for beginners, it’s very forgiving. That old saying, If you can hit the broad side of a barn?’ It’s true in squash.”

Now, the only problem is finding room in your barn to build a court.