Shabana Khan is ready to make a racket as squash grows in popularity

In her own words, Shabana Khan has either been teaching or playing squash “for a very, very long time.”

Since she was 9, to be exact. That’s when she began playing with her father, Yusuf Khan, a tennis and squash pioneer in the Pacific Northwest who is a cousin of squash legend Jahangir Khan. Starting at age 12, after having played competitively for only a year, she won the U.S. Junior Nationals for four consecutive years.

She turned professional at age 18 and went on to forge one of the most decorated careers in U.S. history. She’s been a 10-time U.S. Women’s National Team member, a four-time Junior National champion and a two-time Pan American Games team member. She’s a former U.S. Women’s Open champion, Howe Cup Team champion, National Skill champion and National Doubles champion.

She founded her own company, YSK Events, in 2013, which brought the Men’s World Squash Championships to the U.S. two years later.

Today, Khan is the squash director at PRO Sports Club in Bellevue, where she teaches and manages other squash pros. Squash will make its debut during the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, and YSK is helping the World Squash Organization, the official organization working with the International Olympic Committee, to land sponsors.

“What I’m most happy about is that as a player I had something to do with it. As a promoter I had something to do with it,” Khan says about the sport’s growing popularity in the U.S. “That’s what our company is all about, to try and elevate women and women leaders, and to make sure people know this is a big thing that’s happening.”

Squash is played by an estimated 20 million people across more than 185 countries and is considered an emerging sport in the U.S., though it lacks, for the most part, major high-profile corporate sponsors. It is particularly popular in Egypt, France, Australia and the U.K., where it was invented in the 19^th century.

Squash is a sport way ahead of its time, paying equal prize money to men and and women at major international championships for years. That legacy of parity is on full display in Khan’s youth clinics today, where boys and girls train as equals.

“They play together and don’t care about gender,” Khan notes. “They just want the competition. The boys make (the girls) tougher, and (the girls) make them kinder. I cannot tell you where else you would see this.”

Squash has taught Khan profound leadership lessons she’s eager to pass on.

“It taught me to be quite resilient,” she says. “Traveling the world, you learn to be a little more patient, to be tolerant of everybody and their habits and to be more accepting. Really, to just be more accepting.”