PSA Issues Provisional Calendar for Return of PSA
Tour
The Professional Squash Association (PSA) has issued a provisional
schedule which will see the return of professional squash for the first
time since the PSA Tour was suspended in March due to the global
COVID-19 pandemic.
The PSA World Tour is planned to resume on Wednesday September 16 with
the Manchester Open, a PSA World Tour Silver event held at the National
Squash Centre in Manchester.
The CIB PSA World Tour Finals is then planned to take place between
September 28 - October 3 in Cairo, Egypt, with entries being made up of
the current top eight players on the CIB World Tour Finals Leaderboard.
The CIB Egyptian Open will be the first Platinum tournament to take
place since the restart which will be staged in front of Cairo's Great
Pyramid of Giza between October 10-17.
Following that tournament, the tour will head to Doha for the Qatar
Classic between November 1-7 before the El Gouna International (November
14-20), Everbright Sun Hun Kai Hong Kong Open (November 30 - December 6)
and CIB Black Ball Open (December 12-18) close out 2020.
PSA World Tour Provisional Schedule:
September 2020 - December 2020
A number of PSA World Tour events have been provisionally confirmed for
2021, including the rescheduled Allam British Open, and these will be
announced later this year.
The calendar is subject to change and all tournaments will abide by
strict protocols with relation to health and safety, international
travel policies and social distancing guidelines, while there will be no
fans on-site until local situations improve.
In addition to the PSA World Tour resuming, domestic PSA Challenger Tour
events are planned to begin from Thursday September 10, with
international events to follow later in the year. Tournaments on the WSF
& PSA Satellite Tour will be sanctioned from Thursday August 27 onwards.
Further to this, the PSA World Rankings will be unfrozen from October 1,
2020 with a new ranking system coming into play to ensure that no player
rankings are affected during the restart of the PSA Tour.
The new system will remove the divisor - which previously divided the
total number of points a player had accumulated over a 12-month period
by the number of tournaments played to give an average score - and
instead points will be made up of a cumulative total consisting of the
top 10 tournament results for men and top 9 for women.
In addition, to safeguard players’ rankings during the COVID-19
pandemic, the number of months counting towards the ranking system will
be temporarily increased. Rankings from October 1, 2020 - January 21,
2021 will include points earned in tournaments from March 2019 (unless
already excluded from the frozen ranking), to date.
Points will then gradually come off in a staggered rhythm from February
1, 2021, with the normal 12-month rolling time period expected to return
by 1 July 2021.
"After working closely with tournament promoters and players and playing
close attention to health and safety guidelines put in place by
government health authorities, we are delighted to finally be in a
position to map out our plans to restart the PSA Tour," said PSA Chief
Executive Alex Gough.
"During the suspension of the PSA Tour, we have been in regular contact
with tournament promoters to ensure that we are able to reschedule as
many of the tournaments that were unable to take place earlier this year
as possible, and we are pleased to have been able to salvage a number of
major tournaments.
"As always, health and safety has been of the utmost importance in any
plans to restart the tour and we will collaborate closely with all
tournament promoters to ensure that our events will conform to strict
guidelines and mitigate the risks involved so that all players and staff
can operate in a safe space.
"We will undoubtedly miss the fervent support of fans inside our venues
as the tour resumes, but we will endeavour to bring them as much
world-class squash as possible via SQUASHTV - our OTT platform - as well
as through our various media partners and social media channels in the
coming months."
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