Bonus Post — What's Your Target?

How Egypt turned a single answer into a squash dynasty.

The Scene Sets Itself

On May 16, 2026, the PSA World Squash Championships concluded at Palm Hills Club in Giza, Egypt. The women’s final had lasted 106 minutes — the longest women’s final since 11-point scoring was introduced. Amina Orfi, 18 years old, defeated eight-time world champion Nour El Sherbini 6-11, 11-6, 11-9, 7-11, 14-12. Orfi became the youngest player in history to hold the women’s world title, and the first player ever to hold the junior and senior world championships simultaneously.

The men’s final was less dramatic in score. Mostafa Asal, the reigning world number one, defeated Youssef Ibrahim 11-4, 11-1, 12-10 in 56 minutes. Asal’s second world title.

Both finalists in the women’s final: Egyptian. Both finalists in the men’s final: Egyptian. For the second consecutive year, every player who competed in a PSA World Championship final came from the same country.

That is not a coincidence. It is not an anomaly. It is the carefully-designed result of a system.

Nine of Twenty

As of May 18, 2026 — two days after the finals — the men’s PSA World Rankings showed nine Egyptian players in the top 20. Rank 1: Mostafa Asal. Rank 4: Karim Gawad, age 34, his highest ranking reached a decade ago, still in the conversation. Rank 5: Youssef Ibrahim, the finalist. Rank 8: Mohamad Zakaria, age 18, the youngest player in the current top 10. Rank 11, 13, 14, 16, 18: five more Egyptians, each at different points in careers that are still unfolding.

The women’s side is no different. Hania El Hammamy holds rank 1. Nour El Sherbini holds rank 2, even after losing the final she sought to make nine titles. Amina Orfi climbs toward the top. Nouran Gohar, a former world number one, remains in the picture.

Marwan and Mohamed ElShorbagy — who represent England — were born in Alexandria. By Egyptian birth origin, the top 20 is even more heavily weighted toward a single country's developmental pipeline.

This is not a recent development. It is the current chapter of a story that began in 1933.

Ninety Years of the Same Answer

In 1928, a young Egyptian diplomat named F.D. Amr Bey arrived in England and picked up a squash racket for the first time. Five years later, in 1933, he became the first non-English winner of the British Open — which was then effectively the world championship. He won it again in 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, and 1938. Six consecutive titles, retired undefeated in both the British Open and British Amateur Championship finals. He left the sport in 1938 to pursue his career as a diplomat, still at the top of the game.

Egypt has been producing world squash champions for more than 90 years. Amr Bey was not a product of a specialized academy. He was not the result of a government program. He was one exceptional individual.

What has changed is not the individual talent. It is the system around the talent. Egypt has built something that multiplies exceptional individuals at a rate no other country has managed to replicate.

What the System Actually Is

Egypt has an estimated 2,000 to 2,500 squash courts. That estimate comes from Ashraf Hanafi, one of the country’s most respected coaches, who founded Squashraf Academy and has trained players across multiple generations. He acknowledges the difficulty of counting them all.

Most of those courts sit inside government-sponsored social clubs. Heliopolis Club, Al Ahly, Gezira, Al Shams, Sporting Club Alexandria. These are not elite private institutions. They are mass-membership organizations with rosters that can exceed 100,000 members. Al Ahly, Egypt’s largest sports club, runs eight squash courts per location across two facilities.

Black Ball Sporting Club in New Cairo offers 15 glass-backed courts and a four-court glass arena. It runs a structured junior academy with five skill-based levels, assessments every three months with detailed written feedback, and a progression track from under-11 through under-19. Access is available to families across a wide range of incomes.

The development infrastructure is not exclusive. It is pervasive.

The Coach Who Stayed

The question Western squash programs ask is: how do we recruit better talent? Egypt asks a different question: how do we build a system that produces talent continuously?

Part of the answer is coaching. Egypt’s top coaches are former champions who chose to stay. Omar Abdel Aziz — a former professional — coaches current top-ranked players. Ashraf Hanafi played at the elite level; he built an academy. The knowledge does not exit the system when a player retires. It transfers into coaching, and the coaching stays.

The reward for staying is not primarily financial. It is belonging to the thing that matters most in Egyptian squash: the pipeline itself. Coaches here are not career-changers or second-option professionals. They are people for whom squash is the center of identity — and they structured their lives around that identity.

When Hanafi describes his junior program, he notes that under-11 nationals draw over 550 participants in a single age division. He does not describe this as unusual. He describes it as the expected level of participation. The pipeline starts that deep.

One Answer

Hanafi has a way of summarizing what makes the Egyptian system different. He does not cite court counts or academy structures or coaching credentials. He cites a question.

“If you ask, every single one, “What’s your target in squash?” you will get one answer: “World Champion.””

That is the reward talking.

In countries where squash is a club sport pursued alongside school and other activities, the honest answer to “what’s your target?” might be enjoyment, fitness, a college scholarship, or some vague competitive goal. The reward structure of those systems produces those answers.

In Egypt, the reward structure produces one answer. The coaches are former world champions. The clubs are structured around a competitive ladder that ends at the PSA Tour. The national recognition, financial opportunity, and cultural identity available to a squash champion are visible, real, and local. The pathway is not abstract. It is the career of the person coaching you.

When every element of a system points toward the same outcome — access, coaching, competition structure, culture, pathway, financial reward — the behavior it produces is not surprising. It is inevitable.

The Positive Case

The cases in this publication are mostly stories of misalignment: systems where the reward produced behavior that the designers did not want. Wells Fargo rewarded accounts and got fraud. Northern Ireland rewarded biomass heat and got boilers running empty buildings through the night. The pattern repeats across industries, eras, and continents.

Egypt’s squash system is the other direction. The reward is aligned. The behavior it produces exceeds even what was hoped. No single person designed an outcome where nine of the world’s top 20 men’s players and the top three women’s players are Egyptian. No institution set that as a target. It emerged from a system where every incentive pointed the same way.

This is the argument at the center of this series, stated in its positive form: behavior follows rewards. When the rewards are right — when the access, the coaching, the competition structure, the culture, and the pathway are all aligned toward the same outcome — the behavior that follows is extraordinary.

You cannot buy this result. The ElShorbagys — Marwan and Mohamed, both world champions who represent England, both born in Alexandria — are products of the same Egyptian pipeline. The country produced them even before deciding to keep them.

A system that aligned produces more than it intends to. That is not an accident. It is what alignment does.

In your organization, does every person know the answer to “What’s your target?” — and does the reward structure make that answer feel real, visible, and worth pursuing? Or is the target something that appears on a slide but disappears when the incentive architecture runs in the other direction?

If you’re working through an incentive design challenge in your organization — or trying to understand why a policy or strategy that looked right on paper isn’t producing the results you expected — I work with leadership teams on exactly these problems. You can reach me at wayne@waynerepich.com.

Behavior Follows Rewards. The pattern shows up wherever people are measured and rewarded.

Subscribe for free. Share it with someone who needs to read it.

—Wayne

Sources

Robertson, Alex. "Egypt — The Squash Superpower." Control The T, January 23, 2024. https://www.controlthet.com/blogs/egypt-squash-superpower

Gaebel, Markus. "The Secret Behind Egypt's Squash Success: Facilities and Juniors." Racquet Sports Institute, January 31, 2025. https://www.racquetsports.institute/post/the-secret-behind-egypt-squash-success

PSA Squash Tour. "Orfi, Asal crowned 2026 PSA World Champions on historic night." PSA World Championships, May 16, 2026. https://www.psasquashtour.com/featured-news/orfi-asal-crowned-2026-psa-world-champions-historic-night/

Squash Info. Men's PSA World Squash Rankings, May 18, 2026. https://www.squashinfo.com/rankings/men

"F.D. Amr Bey." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._Amr_Bey; confirmed by PSA G.O.A.T. series, psasquashtour.com.

PSA Squash Tour. "El Sherbini Wins Record-Equalling Eighth Worlds Title." PSA World Championships 2024-25. https://worldsquashchamps.com/el-sherbini-wins-record-equalling-eighth-worlds-title/

Squash Info. Women's PSA World Squash Rankings, May 18, 2026. https://www.squashinfo.com/rankings/women

This is a mid-week bonus post, published outside the regular Saturday schedule. Regular posts arrive each Saturday.

Last Saturday: Duolingo built one of the most engaging apps on the planet on a single insight: reward the behavior you want. The question is what happened when they applied that same logic to their own employees.

Next Saturday: NCAA athletes spent decades fighting for the right to profit from their own name and image. They won. The question is what happened when they got exactly what they asked for.

In development — Olympic athletes disqualified for losing; a corporation whose internal ranking system made employees compete against each other instead of the competition; a pro sports league that rewarded losing for four decades. More on the way.

BFR is written to be accessible, welcomed, and celebrated by every reader — not simplified, not elevated. Just clear.