History
The students at Harrow School in England who invented squash rackets also invented squash tennis. It wasn't hard to do: They simply played squash with tennis rackets and balls.
When squash was introduced at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1882, some students there did exactly the same thing, probably without knowing that Harrow students had anticipated them. So squash tennis was invented twice.
In a sense, it was invented for a third time by Stephen J. Feron, a squash rackets professional in New York City. Sometime during the early 1890s, he tried the tennis version of squash but didn't like it, because he couldn't get the same kind of spin on a tennis ball that he could on the standard squash ball. Feron hit on the idea of wrapping some netting tightly around the ball to give it more traction when it hit a wall.
Feron's new version of squash tennis caught on quickly, in and around New York. It became especially popular among the city's tycoons. Several of them, including August Belmont, Herbert Harriman, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller, had courts built in their homes.
In 1898, the prestigious Tuxedo Club in Tuxedo Park, New York, built a court and organized the first squash tennis club. Many university clubs in the city quickly followed suit. They organized the Metropolitan Squash Tennis League in 1908. Two years later, the National Squash Tennis Association (NSTA) was founded.
The NSTA codified rules that were somewhat different from the squash rackets rules then in effect. The court was somewhat narrower, at 17 feet rather than 18 1/2 feet and the playing area on the walls was somewhat lower. The tennis version also used the "hand in and hand out" method of scoring, under which only the server can score a point. (That was changed in 1954.)
In 1913, a slightly smaller, much livelier ball was developed for the sport, under contract with Spalding. The internal pressure was increased in 1918, making the ball even faster. That probably hurt the sport, in the long run. Many squash rackets players abandoned squash tennis because the speed of the ball took much of the finesse out of the sport.
While squash tennis remained relatively popular in New York City through the 1920s and 1930s, it was pretty much confined to the city. During the very period was squash rackets was gaining hundreds of players in the Midwest and West, squash tennis pretty much stagnated.
Spalding stopped making the balls after World War II because of the declining market. Some interest was revived during the 1970s and early 1980s by the emergence of Pedro Bacallao, a Cuban exile who ruled the sport, both as a player and as president of the NSTA.
Bacallao left New York City for Miami in 1979, though he remained NSTA president until 1982. After that, squash tennis continued its slow death. The last national championship tournament was held in 1995.