Photography has provided Harris with new reasons to continue traveling. It is something she prefers doing alone, carrying just her backpack, as she captures stunning wildlife photos like this spoonbill in High Island, Texas.

by Lou Mancinelli

When Julieanne Harris first came to the Philadelphia Cricket Club (PCC) in March of 1992, its squash program was an informal group that consisted of Harris and a few kids who played on two hardball squash courts that no longer exist.

Since then, Harris has turned the Cricket Club's squash club into an international powerhouse: since 2000, 50 PCC players have won National Doubles Squash Championships; since '95, 27 National Singles Championships have been won (24 junior, three adult), and nine members (eight juniors, one adult) have played on the U.S. National Team.

That's not to say that before Harris became official Director of Squash around that time that PCC was without its accolades: before 1992 PCC recorded nine Adult Singles Championships, and since 1941, 41 adults have won National Doubles Championships. But during her reign the club has flourished.

Of the nearly 1500 PCC members, a third play squash, as many as 300 kids and 200 adults. “With a country club like this you've got a captured audience,” Harris said about how the program has grown over the past 23-plus years. “In squash you're not going to go on and make a lot of money. You're really going to play because you love it.”

So many dedicated squash players are individuals who maintain careers and other responsibilities while still training, often two or three hours a day, that they can compete at a very high level. Because so many people were already members of PCC when Harris started directing the squash program, it was a matter of appealing to a built-in crowd.

“We make it so it's a fun place to be,” she said about growing the program, especially for juniors. “If we make it fun here, they want to come.” And Harris knows that if they come, they will practice. “It's a certain discipline,” she said.

But at the Cricket Club, it's the kind of discipline that produces national champions and top-caliber players. Like Gilly Lane, who was raised in the area. Lane, a 2007 University of Pennsylvania graduate, started as a junior in the program, and has won three Professional Squash Association (PSA) titles, reached eight PSA finals, and held a world ranking of 48, the second-highest ever held by an American.

Lane is now an assistant coach with the Penn squash program. Another PCC player who's excelled and won numerous doubles and singles championships is Richard Sheppard. But Harris was quick to mention that squash is a game played by people of all ages. Many people in their 60s and 70s play at the Cricket Club, too.

Born in the Australian outback but raised in Sydney, Harris, 62, had a world-class squash career. She won several National Squash Singles and Doubles Championships, and in 2004 she won the World 40+ Mixed and Women's Doubles Championships. But growing up, squash was never on her radar screen.

Rather, art was her thing. “I've always sort of had one foot in athletics and one foot in art,” Harris said during a recent interview. Growing up, she played tennis as a kid, but she studied painting and drawing at art school. She was 23 when her brother, who played in a local Catholic Squash League, needed another player for a doubles game. She was picked up, and she liked the game. Within six years, Harris went from not playing to competing on an international championship level.

In fact, it was through squash that Harris met the man in New South Wales who would become her husband, an American named Bill Lane (no relation to Gilly Lane). He was overseas learning the softball style of squash the international community was playing at the time.

Julieanne Harris (rear, second from right), who came to the Philadelphia Cricket Club in March of 1992, was a world-class squash player, winning Australian national and international championships. She has mentored countless youngsters from the Chestnut Hill area, like this group.

“American squash was so far behind the rest of the world,” Harris recalled. Before adopting softball squash, Americans played a variant of the game called hardball squash; the difference is softball squash is played on a slightly larger court, with a softer ball. The first games Harris played at the Cricket Club in '92 when she was starting to develop the program were on hardball courts. But since then the facility has been modernized and now includes eight international courts, two doubles courts, a bar/social area and a new ladies locker room.

Strangely, squash is the impetus that has both sidelined and reincarnated Harris' work in the realm of the arts. When she first started developing the Cricket Club's squash program, Harris stopped painting. (She worked generally with oil paints then.) But half a decade or so later, she was volunteering at the 1998 Junior World Championships in Princeton, when someone realized they needed photographs of the event for the group she was volunteering for. Harris just happened to have her camera.

“I totally fell in love with that again,” she said. So much so that photography has provided her new reasons to continue traveling, something she first started doing because of squash ― and something she prefers doing alone, carrying just her backpack. Two years ago she saw there was a ballet and dance festival in St. Petersburg, Russia. She went and served as a volunteer, taking photographs for the organization that produced the festival. On her website, her photographs suggest the austerity of fine art. They are balanced and often poignant. And there is a vital element to her landscape photography that suggests motion.

Closer to home, for the past six years Harris, an Overbrook Farms resident, has volunteered as a photographer for Grace Dance Theater as well as the Philadelphia School for the Creative and Performing Arts.

Meanwhile, these days Harris, who first started coming to the Cricket Club just a few days a week while her husband worked at another squash program in the area, is on the squash court teaching or training a few days a week. Aside from the championships, one of the things Harris is most proud of about the PCC squash program is the number of players who've gone on to be captains of their college and national teams, leaders at the next level. She knows how squash has been the impetus in her life that in many ways freed her. She wonders if without squash she'd have ever gotten out of Sydney.

“I'd a been sitting back in Australia in my little house with my parents, doing nothing.”

For more information about the squash program at The Philadelphia Cricket Club, call 215-233-1110 or visit www.philacricket.com. For more information about Harris' photography, visit julieanneharris.com.