To much of the student body at Hogg Middle School, squash is a vegetable.

The sport associated with elite Northeastern prep schools and Ivy League universities is not part of their world. But now, with a grant from a Houston-based nonprofit, Hogg students are playing on the first squash courts at any public school in the United States.

"It takes the children out of their element into places like Rice University and the Metropolitan Club downtown. It shows the children a different place in life," said Alistair Barnes, a Houston insurance salesman who founded the nonprofit Mission Squash, which sponsored the initiative.

Hogg's sixth-graders are rotating to try out the sport in small groups for two weeks at a time because no one signed up for the physical education elective right away. They're playing on new courts built in the gym's old storage space with a $165,000 grant from Mission Squash.

The students' lack of familiarity with squash, the game, is understandable. Perhaps more than any other sport, squash is seen as part of the domain of the wealthy, elite and white. Eighty-five percent of students at Hogg come from low-income families, and 88 percent are Hispanic, according to Houston Independent School District data.

Mission Squash is one of several "urban squash" programs nationwide that mentor low-income students through the sport, typically at schools where at least 75 percent of students qualify as low-income.

As in many mentorship programs, instructors and coaches provide academic guidance and community service opportunities. But Mission Squash's program also includes an introduction to a game that has a long cultural association with wealth.

"To them, they don't know it's an elite sport. They just think it's a fun sport with a racquet," said Hogg Middle School Principal Angela Sugarek.

To play, students need shoes, a racquet, goggles and a squash ball. The nonprofit covers the total cost, which comes to $3,400 a year per student, including coaching. The instructors are being brought in as contractors, like those who come to Hogg to teach karate.

In the first class introducing a small group of Hogg students to squash last week, the students started with some basic exercises - bouncing the ball off the racquet, like in tennis lessons, and hitting the ball back to themselves off the court's wall.

"What will happen is they will be a little bit amused by what the game is all about, and then in 10 minutes, they'll have a lot of fun running around and realize what competition is in squash," Barnes said.

Twenty minutes into his first class, sixth-grader Daniel Montelongo had a knack for the sport but hadn't decided if he was going to sign up full-time.

"It's kind of like tennis, but you just hit the wall on the other side," Montelongo said. "It's a little bit hard, a little bit easy."

As an International Baccalaureate school, part of Hogg Middle School's stated mission is to expose its students to new activities and ideas.

For the school, it's not that squash is inherently better than football or basketball, but that these students might not ever encounter the sport on their own.

"I just think about these kids in 10 years," Sugarek said. " 'I played squash.' "