The sport’s first great international champion was F. D. Amr Bey, an Egyptian diplomat who started playing while stationed in England. He went on to win six consecutive British Open championships—then the sport’s biggest international competition—in the 1930s. His success inspired Egypt’s ball boys, one of whom, Mahmoud El Karim, racked up four of his own British Open championships in the 1940s.

Egypt didn’t produce many international champions between the 1950s and the 1990s. Repeated wars and domestic turmoil during the period made it difficult for the country’s best players to travel for tournaments while based in Egypt. “All the top players left the country and lived in Europe, and that’s when the drop [in Egyptian squash] happened,” Amr Shabana, a four-time squash world champion from Egypt, told me. The best players who stayed in Egypt couldn’t tour internationally. “[T]he country was on lockdown,” Shabana said.

But in the late 1980s, Shabana, then 10 years old, and another player named Ahmad Barada, age 12, planted the seeds of Egypt’s resurgence when they started playing together at Cairo’s Maadi Club. Because Egypt’s remaining squash talent couldn’t tour, those players trained and competed in Cairo, meaning Barada and Shabana could practice and compete against some of the country’s best from a very young age. As Shabana explained, “There’s a quote that says ‘you’re only as good as the people around you.’ Around us were the best players—maybe not the best in the world, but we thought they were.” And they were also helped by the geography of Cairo, where, Shabana said, the squash clubs were all within a half hour's drive of one another. (This is in contrast to the U.S., where the major squash hubs are scattered between Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.) The result was a tight squash community centered on Cairo’s clubs. “This is the main reason squash thrived,” Shabana said. “Everybody pushed each other. This was I think quite unique.”

Beyond exposure to top professionals, Shabana and Barada had other advantages. The most noteworthy is that the rules of Egyptian tournaments permitted them to play many more matches than they would have been able to in England or the U.S. A 10-year-old Shabana competed in the bracket for players under 12, the U12, as well as the Under-14, Under-16, Under-19, and men’s tournaments, meaning he could potentially play five matches a day. More rigid conventions in the U.S. and England guide young players to compete in one bracket at a time, meaning they might only play one-fifth as many matches as their Egyptian counterparts have.

At the same time that Shabana and Barada were honing their art on the local level, President Hosni Mubarak—a squash player in his own right—was promoting squash’s prestige at the national level. In 1996, Mubarak brought a major international tournament to Egypt, and had a glass court built in front of the pyramids. Barada, then 19, reached the finals, and Mubarak congratulated him personally. Barada later reached second place in the Professional Squash Association’s World Rankings.