LAHORE   -  While many fans of the sport know Muhammad Faheem Khan as one of the UAE’s top-ranked squash players and the longstanding coach at Al-Nasr Leisure Land in Dubai, his past two years have been spent in Pennsylvania, USA, where he’s drawing upon his Pakistani squash heritage to shape the careers of America’s elite junior athletes. 

Born in Peshawar, Khan started playing squash at the age of eight as the latest in a long line of dedicated and globally-lauded squash players. Khan trained under the guidance of his father, Muhammad Saleem Khan, top 10 world player and captain of Pakistan’s 1977 World Championship-winning team, who had in fact learned the art of the game from his father, Muhammad Amin Khan, semifinalist at the 1954 British Open and distinguished coach at Karachi Gymkhana. 

Coming from such an accomplished squash lineage, the pressure was on for Faheem Khan to make a name for himself, which he first did as the Number 3 player on Pakistan’s national team. After moving to Dubai, Khan’s profile in the sport continued to rise. In many ways, Khan’s exceedingly fine racquet control and ability to introduce gut-wrenching pace changes prefigured the ascendant Egyptian style of play, whose practitioners continue to employ these tools and techniques to great effect. However, despite Khan’s continued success as a competitor on the world stage – he recorded an undefeated season and was named the UAE’s Player of the Year in 2009 – it’s the coaching of the sport that Khan has identified as his true calling. 

For 17 years, Khan served as Leisure Land’s head squash coach, where his pupils included Ahsan Ayaz, currently ranked 87 in the world, and Jaida Hammam, who at the age of 15 became the youngest player to ever win the UAE Open. Many of Khan’s other students at Al-Nasr will also be familiar to squash enthusiasts, as he trained many of the region’s most accomplished young talents, including Aditya Jagtap, Asim Ahmed Khan, the Venkat brothers, Vikram and Vishal, and the Saleem brothers, Adham and Ammar. 

In his nearly two decades at Al-Nasr, Khan transformed Leisure Land into a regional squash hub. As Al-Nasr’s athletes were sad to see him leave for the United States in 2019, Khan knew he was leaving behind a robust squash programme with a deeply-rooted squash culture, one that is globally competitive and far larger than it was when he first took over as head coach in the early 2000s. 

Now, Khan has set his sights on a new goal that is using his decades of coaching and professional squash experience and his lifelong immersion in squash culture to transform the games of America’s most elite junior players. He is doing this at Life Time, whose clubs span over 150 locations in North America. Khan has designed a host of original drills and training methods to instill in his players a level of mental and technical subtlety that is rarely found in Western players. In this, Khan emphasizes that his primary aim is to improve what he calls his players, “Squash IQ,” the ability to read and adapt to split-second changes in opponent behavior and game pacing. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic wanes and international squash competition returns in full swing, fans of the sport would be wise to turn their attention to Pennsylvania, USA – under the guidance of expert coach Faheem Khan, the newest generation of top American talent is combining the best of Eastern and Western squash traditions, and it’s clear that they are a force to be reckoned with.