ost sports in Bermuda are racially mixed, but there are still a few which have traditionally struggled to attract people from a broad cross-section of the community.

Football and cricket are, and have always been predominantly played by blacks. These days, barring the expat Leg Trappers, the number of white people playing in the local cricket leagues can be counted on the fingers of one hand while white representation at a national team level is even more sparse.

Not that there is anything particularly surprising about this. They are, after all, deemed to be our national sports and given the high participation levels and Bermuda?s racial demographics, it follows that this should be so.

On the other side of the divide, meanwhile, there are one or two sports which are, or are perceived to be almost exclusively white.

In Bermuda at least, squash is undoubtedly one of these, though to people like Ross Triffitt this is a source of great frustration.

Even before Bermuda?s director of squash arrived on the Island seven years ago from Australia, there were others before him who battled tirelessly to try and break down this damaging perception.

But despite a junior programme which sees hundreds of public school children exposed to the sport every year and numerous coaching scholarships awarded almost exclusively to black recipients, Triffitt admits it has been difficult changing people?s minds.

?We?ve been trying as hard as we possibly can to change squash?s image ? to make it more accessible and attractive to all Bermudians,? said the man credited with transforming local squash beyond all recognition and responsible for bringing the World Open here in November of next year.

?I find it a little bit frustrating at times when I still hear people say that squash is a ?white sport? when that is not the reality either here or globally. We welcome all youngsters here and if they work hard and have some ability the opportunities are endless.

?The way I like to look at it is this: one of our current national team players freely admits that the first time he ever set foot on the squash club premises he came down here to steal a bike.

?But when he looked inside the club, he saw squash for the very first time and liked it. He began taking part, got involved in our junior programme and here he is years later having travelled all over the world representing his country in major international competitions.

?I think that?s a fantastic illustration of what this sport can offer people and also how we as an organisation are not prepared to turn anybody away.

?Like all of these things though it is going to take time and a lot of effort to get rid of the stereotype.?

riffitt is certainly no stranger to breaking down cultural and racial barriers.

The youngest of two boys brought up in the Australian capital, Canberra, he spent large portions of his early childhood in a small Fijian village where his librarian father was completing an anthropological thesis on the lives of the native people.

So closely did his father work with the members of the village, that Triffitt and his family were formally adopted by the tribe and he even went to school there for some time and learnt the local dialect.

?Before I was 11 we would go there every year and the longest I remained in the village was for around six months,? he said.

?My father and mother were university librarians and it was my dad who developed an interest in Fijian culture and pursued it at an academic level. It was an amazing experience to have at a very young age.

?After I turned 11 my visits back there got fewer and fewer. But when my father passed away when I was 15, we went back there for a big memorial service in the village which was a very sad but at the same time a very poignant occasion.

?We earned a lot of respect because we showed a lot of respect for their beliefs and traditions and were very accepting of their culture. I?d like to think that approach has stayed with me through my life.?

The Fijian adventure aside, Triffitt?s other life back in Canberra was fairly typical of a sporty Aussie kid.

A talented tennis and rugby player, he did not pick up a squash racquet until he was 13 ? but it was soon clear he had found his strongest suit.

?Up to that point tennis had been my main sport ? but when my mother introduced me to squash I found that I picked it up quickly and really enjoyed it,? he said.

?I started playing for the state team (Australian Capital Territory) when I was 14 and I played my first Australian Championships at Under-15 level.

?I was never really regarded as the next top professional or anything like that but I was certainly well above the club level and I think it was anticipated that I could have some kind of professional career if things went well.?

Triffitt?s repeated attempts at making a successful playing career for himself in the top echelons of squash were undermined by physical rather than mental weakness.

In his late teens and early 20s he thought of little else but making it, and trained accordingly for the rigours of such a life.

But every time he started to build up a head of steam, a long-term injury would intervene. First it was a fractured thumb, which for a variety of reasons (a reluctance to rest being one of them) took almost two years to heal and required re-constructive surgery to put right. The next was a major neck injury, which struck not long after he made his return to the professional ranks in 1997.

Just prior and in between the injuries, he played a few professional tournaments, won the Australian doubles title in 1994, represented Australia at the World Doubles Championships and was selected in the Aussie squad for the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur.

?I was a very driven person and though I might not have been the most talented Australian squash player to emerge at that time, I was certainly one of the hardest working,? he said.

?At certain times when I was injury free I was getting up at 5.30 in the morning to go and train and I was completely determined to do what was required.

?But the reality was that my body was just not built to cope with the stress and I kept breaking down. In all honesty I would probably have not been good enough to make it as a top ten player and once I?d decided that it wasn?t going to happen I turned my energy towards becoming a professional coach instead.

?Looking back, I don?t have any regrets about it. I would have liked to have worn the green and gold of Australia a few more times in major competitions because as far as I am concerned representing your country is the greatest honour anybody can have. But it wasn?t to be.?

riffitt came to Bermuda in 1999 after a spell coaching in Canberra, where he founded the Canberra Squash Academy and went on to do some work for the highly-regarded Australian Institute of Sport.

Initially here purely to coach, he inherited the director of squash position in 2000 and has by common consent built impressively on the foundation left behind by predecessor Jane Parker.

The list of accomplishments is long and varied: one of the most vibrant junior programmes of any sport on the Island, multiple titles and medals for both the junior and senior national teams, more active members than at any time in the Bermuda Squash Association?s history.

And, of course, he also put pen to paper on the biggest contractual deal in the history of the sport with the Professional Squash Association, bringing to the Island over a three-year period both the PSA Masters and the World Open ? the two biggest events in squash.

Triffitt is not solely responsible for all this ? he is the first to point to the staff and the hundreds of volunteers who have helped him.

But without his long-term vision, contacts and understanding of what could be achieved if the right people and the right resources were channelled in the appropriate direction, it is generally agreed that the scale of any achievement would have been far less.

Nevertheless, there have been grumblings.

Triffitt does sometimes stand accused of devoting too much of his time to the professional events and neglecting the domestic scene while his ideas also face some resistance from those people who care more about getting a court when they want one than they do about the development of the sport as a whole.

There are other problems.

With squash in the middle of a boom period, the four-court club is increasingly unable to cope with demand and the search for a new site on which to build a new facility has been a long and often fruitless endeavour.

And with the announcement that three courts are going to be built in Hamilton by a private developer and that Wyndam Resorts are to build courts of their own when they re-develop their South Shore property (over which the BSRA are to have limited, if any, control) there is the very slight danger that membership could recede to the levels of the mid-1990s when the squash club came perilously close to locking its doors.

?Again it does get a bit frustrating trying to get people to look at the bigger picture,? Triffitt said in response to some of these concerns.

?What we?re starting to look at is perhaps quite a bit more separation between the club and the Association. The club is a commercial enterprise whereas the Association?s role is to promote and grow the game ? which sometimes means that the interests of the two parties do not come together. That does create problems from time to time.

?In terms of other courts being built, I think it?s a good thing because at least it means we?ll have more facilities to cope with the demand, because as it stands the courts we have available are far too busy and we need to spread the load a little bit.

?I don?t think it will affect the squash club that greatly to be honest, but it does mean that there is a bit of extra competition which I think will be a good thing.

?We are also looking to expand our own facility. It?s a process which has been going on for some time but we do have something in the pipeline which hopefully will come through in the not too distant future.?

And what about the criticism that he?s been a little too one-track-minded?

?I?ve said this before but the trickle-down effect of having these massive events in Bermuda is significant and I think people have got to understand that,? he said.

?Our membership is up, participation levels are up, the results from both our national junior and senior teams have been very good and the overall standard of play is as high as its been since I?ve been here.

?We would still like more females involved in the sport, which is something we?ve been struggling with for a while now but we continue to make efforts in that area.

?We?ve also got a lot more money ? more than we?ve ever had before ? and that?s partly because of the professional events. We wouldn?t run them if we were not in a position to make a profit and were able to plough some of the funds back into the junior programme or to pay for the scholarships we award.

?Of course there are always going to be a few teething problems and one or two things we could have done better, but I think overall we are in a very strong position.?