ABOUT

Paul Assaiante

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Paul Assaiante is the squash and tennis coach at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. Since March 1998 his Trinity squash team has won thirteen straight national championships and a record 252 consecutive matches.

A graduate of Springfield College with a masters from Long Island University, he has coached gymnastics, squash and tennis at the U.S. Military Academy and squash and tennis at Williams College, as well as serving as the director of racquet sports at the Apawamis Club in Rye, NY, the Baltimore Country Club, the Bellevue Athletic Club in Seattle and the Princeton Club of New York. As the squash coach at West Point, Williams and Trinity, he has a career record of 430-88; and his Trinity record after seventeen seasons is 307-14, a stunning 95.6 winning percentage..

Assaiante is currently the National Coach for U.S. Squash. He has coached the Hartford Fox Force in the World Team Tennis league. He has twice coached the U.S. men’s squash team at the Pan-Am Games, as well as the 2003 World Championships. Twice he has been named the U.S. Olympic Coach of the Year and in 1999 the Hartford Courant named him the Connecticut Coach of the Century. He is also the author of Championship Tennis by the Experts (1981).

 

James Zug

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James Zug is an historian and independent writer. He received a masters in nonfiction writing from Columbia in 1999 and has taught writing at George Mason University. He has written for the Atlantic, Tin House, Mail & Guardian, Tennis Week, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine and VanityFair.com. A former book review columnist for Outside, he has reviewed books for the Boston Globe, New York Times Book Review, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Boston Book Review and Fast Company. He is also the only professional journalist covering the game of squash in the U.S.: he is a senior writer at Squash Magazine, the chair of the U.S. Squash Hall of Fame & Museum and has written on the game for magazines across Europe and the Middle East.

He is the author of five previous books: a history of U.S. squash (Scribner, 2003); a history of a century-old Quaker summer community in Pocono Lake, PA (privately-published, 2004); a biography of John Ledyard (Basic Books, 2005); a history of the Guardian, a Cape Town anti-apartheid newspaper (Michigan State, 2007) and a history of Sidwell Friends School (privately-published, 2008). He also edited John Ledyard’s collected writings (National Geographic, 2005). He writes a blog about racquet sports: www.squashword.com. For more information, visit jameszug.com.

Coaching to Overcome Fear