An All-American squash player at Williams, as a member of the Class of 1984, and a former top-ranked professional player, Greg Zaff turned a term-paper project at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government into a youth development program. It uses squash, a game generally played at wealthy schools and clubs, to entice middle school students from inner-city Boston and Cambridge to devote time to extra academic study and community service along with squash practice and competition. Students attend two tutoring sessions per week and volunteer for a variety of projects, including neighborhood cleanup and befriending the elderly. On the court, SquashBuster teams compete successfully with Boston-area private schools and in tournaments as far away as Philadelphia. Zaff has overseen every aspect of the program’s creation and development. In conjunction with Northeastern University, he will break ground this fall on a $5 million facility that will enable the program to serve ten times as many students. His work has inspired the creation of similar programs in New York City and Philadelphia.
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