One would have thought that hosting the second biggest tournament in professional squash was a large enough responsibility in itself - but when you are required in little over a week to build the facilities in which the event is to be held, the scale of the task borders on the ridiculous.

But this is exactly what has been taking place over recent days at the Jessie Vesey Sports Centre at Bermuda High School for Girls, as three 40-foot containers holding well over 20 tonnes of equipment have been laboriously unloaded into the main arena.

The state-of-the art all-glass court imported from the United States has been raised upon a stage three feet off the ground - which had to be reinforced to cope with the seven-and-a -half-tonne load - while 600 theatre-style seats have also been installed.

Together with a multitude of cameras, plasma televisions, speakers, specially-imported lighting, endless rolls of carpet and close to 400 sheets of plywood, the project has been a mammoth undertaking made possible only by the work and co-operation of hundreds of local squash enthusiasts.

Leading the charge is tournament facilities manager Mark DeVerteuil, pictured left, who has been again assigned the daunting task of co-ordinating the entire endeavour.

And while the BCM McAlpine employee insisted the project has been relatively painless thus far, he nonetheless conceded the team had learned a few harsh lessons from the harrowing experience of 2004.

Setting aside only four days to get the arena ready to host world-class squash, event organisers were forced to work round the clock, snatching only a few hours of sleep and were running on empty by the event's conclusion.

This year, however, organisers have attacked the challenge with a definitive plan and are confident everything will run smoothly.

“We didn't give ourselves anywhere near enough time last year to put the whole arena together, and some of us ended up having virtually no sleep and going through a lot of anxiety,” DeVerteuil said, whose calm, jovial manner masks the prodigious responsibility that rests upon his shoulders.

“It was also the first time we had done anything like this before so we made plenty of little mistakes. This time we treated it like a proper construction project and came at it with a definitive plan.

“Of course some things will probably go wrong but in general I think it's going to work out really well and the whole setting will blow people away when they first walk in.”

For those who work at BHS or use the complex on a regular basis, the enormity of the transformation is staggering.

“I remember staff and school kids walking into the gym last year and watching their jaws drop,” DeVerteuil continued.

“When everything is up and running, there is no doubt the setting is pretty dramatic and being in an enclosed space, the atmosphere is terrific. I'm on duty, of course, throughout the tournament - but hopefully there will be no major problems so all of us involved can sit back and enjoy what we have worked so hard to achieve.”