Long a leader in squash tournaments, Heights Casino is a national beacon
The Baird Haney Juniors Tournament, which attracts the top players from the entire Northeast, is just one of three squash events hosted by the historic Heights Casino. Founded in 1904, the Casino (named for an earlier concept of ‘Casino’ as a house of games, rather than a place to gamble), built two of the earliest indoor tennis courts in the U.S. and later added squash courts and in the early 1930s a doubles squash court in the basement. Based at 75 Montague Street, the Casino hosted the earliest Open Doubles Squash Championship in the U.S. in 1938. It attracted the top professionals and amateurs of the time, and has continued to do so continuously since. (In the 1960s it was renamed in honor of David C. Johnson, a Heights resident and champion player who won the tournament.)
In the 1970s, the nation’s first serious juniors program was begun by club professional Fred Weymuller. Unlike other toney and suburban clubs in Westchester, Greenwich, and Philadelphia, the Heights Casino junior players could walk to their club. Weymuller thereby was able to create a high-powered program that included practice before and after school, with huge participation. To this day, the Casino employs many more squash–and tennis–professionals year-round than any of the country clubs in suburbia. Fred Weymuller’s protégé and wife Carol led the development of women’s squash in metropolitan NYC and the Casino created more than three decades ago the ‘Weymuller’–an international women’s tournament that still attracts the top 16 players from all over the world.
In the 1980s, a beloved assistant pro named Baird Haney was killed in a car crash on the Manhattan Bridge. An existing junior tournament run by head pro David Temple was re-named in honor of Baird Haney, and it has since become a very popular–perhaps the top–stop on the metropolitan junior tournament circuit.