Barrett Takesian, Portland Community Squash

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Barrett Takheejian opened the Community center at Portland Community Squash in January of 2017 and he currently serves as President and Executive Director. Thanks for coming in today.

Barrett Takesian:

Thanks for having me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So you and I both went to Bowdoin College, I noticed.

Barrett Takesian:

That's news to me. That's great. Go you bears.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Go you bears indeed. But before that you grew up in Southwest Harbor?

Barrett Takesian:

Yeah, for the first 10 years of my life I grew up on the Hinkley Boatyard right at the bottom of the harbor in Southwest Harbor, Maine.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So what was that like growing up at the Hinkley Boatyard?

Barrett Takesian:

Well, despite having sailing all around me, I was a high energy kid. So my preferred activity in that small town was throwing a ball against the barn. And when the winter came, I moved up to the attic and thought I was Nomar Garcia Parra throwing the ball across at the window at the other side of the attic. So I was an active kid. It was me and my little sister and we actually had a pond in the backyard too, so we my grandfather used to stock it with trout and I did a little fly fishing as a kid too, so found a way to stay active in a little bit of a sleepy town. But now I really appreciate the true beauty up there every chance I get to go back.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's an impressive boatyard. I've actually been there. So I think about like how how much has been put into that town just by virtue of having that business there.

Barrett Takesian:

Yeah, that business has really shaped a lot of the values in my life. My My grandfather ran the Hinkley Company when I was a kid, and I ended up moving away when my mother remarried for my middle school and high school years down in Boston. But I just remember the Hinkley Company, it grew really fast after my grandfather had sold the company. And once that small brand got leveraged to be a big company, it went through some tough times. And the company's in great shape now because I think they've gotten back to their smaller roots. But what a beautiful thing when all the boats were built there in Southwest harbor and everyone in that community was contributing to that one brand. And then when it outgrew that small town feel, I think the company had a little bit of a different identity. But now that I run my own business, I think about the beauty of simplicity and not necessarily overgrowing too fast, but enjoying the community that you've built and the people that it's sustaining.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You were an economics major at Bowdoin?

Barrett Takesian:

Yeah. I hung on. I went into Bowdoin. I thought I had a game plan. I transferred in halfway through my sophomore year, and I studied economics and environmental science. And I loved the idea of the futuristic nature of green energy and thinking about how cool it would be to have these electric cars on the streets and these farms that were off the grid powered by solar. So I had a vision that drove me in college. And then when it was time to look for a job, I realized that there were actually that. It might have sounded great in my head, but it wasn't necessarily where my passion was. And I ended up taking a job for an insurance company here Unum in Portland, which was a great training program, taught me how to be a professional. And then from there I got to explore a few more of my interests. And it turned out that building community was what was most important to me. And that's what I really took from Bowdoin was the fact that no matter where I was on the campus, I was with people that supported me. And I wanted to bring that type of a community wherever I went. In the case in my early 20s, that was Portland, Maine.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

When you talk about throwing a ball against a wall, that's basically my. That's my child. He was growing up and I think he thought he was no more. Also, he's a little younger than you, but. But it really was important to him. He always was like a constant motion kind of kid.

Barrett Takesian:

Sure.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And at the same time, he also, I think, really relished being a part of a team. He played baseball. Does that do those things? All Kind of come together in the job that you're doing now.

Barrett Takesian:

Yeah, absolutely. When I think about what I and the rest of the team at Portland Community Squash can offer our kids, things we talk about are helping kids find a passion and a community that supports them. And when I was a kid in a small, somewhat isolating setting in Southwest harbor, the Red Sox were that community for me. So I had a little AM radio in my bedroom, and I used to swing at every pitch, and. And I still have. I. I just still have great memories all the way into my teenage years listening to the Red Sox on that radio, whether I was cooking dinner with my dad or whatnot. So I still have that radio today. So that was my little community as a kid. And the community that I offer students now is one that revolves around a sport I found in Boston, squash.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, talk to me about squash now. I grew up in the 80s. It was racquetball, which I think is somewhat different. But why squash?

Barrett Takesian:

Yeah, well, racquetball was really an American phenomenon. We have 30,000 racquetball courts in the United States and 3,000 squash courts. But if you look internationally, squash is played in 185 countries. Goes back to the early 1800s. It came out of the UK and racquetball is a great game for the recreationalist because you can just get out there, the ball's bouncing everywhere. It's pure athleticism. Not as much technique. The nature of squash, it's actually a dead ball, or we call it a dead ball, meaning it doesn't have that same lively bounce. If you were to drop a squash ball on the floor, it would barely come off the ground. So how that translates onto a court is that you have total control of where you hit the ball. So if you decide to hit a short shot in the front of the court, you move your opponent to the front, that opens up the back, then you can send it to the back of the court. So there's a lot more technique to learn how to control the ball. But it's a game that you can never stop learning about because you're constantly battling to get your opponent out of position and then applying pressure. So there's a lot of. Lot of strategy and a lot of cardio, too, because you're lunging into every corner of the court for 45 minutes. So it's. It has a lot more traction at the collegiate level. At the professional level, there's a really robust tour with players from all over the world. And now it's the two fastest growing countries in the world are China and the United States for squash right now. So it's a good sport to be part of the.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And you learned about this in Boston?

Barrett Takesian:

Yeah. When my father moved to Boston, someone recommended he try squash out his way to meet people in the city. And I used to hop on a court in the basement and just hit around until my dad was done with his matches. But I remember the club pro telling me to hold a pencil out and see if I could get the pencil to go in the strings of the racket to see if I had the hand eye coordination. And my dad turned to the pro and said, I don't think you know my son. So he just gave me a ball and I'd go down there and solo for an hour straight when I was, you know, six, seven years old and, you know, ended up playing tournaments and getting recruited to high schools to play, believe it or not. And eventually it was my path to Bowdoin as well.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So you went from being Nomar to being like, the squash guy?

Barrett Takesian:

Yeah, sure. Peter Nickel. He was my squash idol.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Peter Nickel, yeah. Why do you think that in the United States and in China, squash is growing in popularity?

Barrett Takesian:

Well, unfortunately, I think a lot of it is, is fueled by this desire to be recruited to colleges. And the New York Times about 10 years ago wrote an article about how squash was the secret pathway into the Ivy League universities. And to be honest, it was. Squash in the United States was only played in prep schools and elite universities. So we in this country, still, we actually have more collegiate squash positions than we do high school squash positions. So think about a sport like basketball where you have 100 high school players for every one collegiate player. Squash is upside down on its head. So you might have one high school squash player for every two college squash players. So a lot of the collegiate teams are actually filled by recruiting international students to come in and play for these programs. And now we have 70 collegiate programs and just a great college sport to be part of. So anytime that there's a clear next step after high school participation, kids are going to get put into the sport. But the problem with the sport has always been accessibility. So the program that we created here in Portland is known as the most accessible squash facility in the country. We have an extremely affordable membership for anyone in the community to come enjoy the sport. Squash is a sport at every Portland public school now, elementary, middle, and high school. And we even have programs that work with students year round for 10 years to make sure that if squash is a passion of yours, it's something that can take you all around the world and to a great college one day. So we don't shy away from the fact that it's a good tool. But for us, it's a lot more than throwing a lot of money towards the kids so that they can get into a school. For us, it's the 17ft between the courts we feel is a really powerful community at Portland Community Squash. And so we use it as a hook and a common ground to bring together every demographic in Portland. And it didn't have to be squash. It could have been theater, it could have been ice skating, it could have been anything. But squash just happens to be a really powerful tool for doing the work that we're doing. And a lot of cities across the country have taken notice and are trying to replicate what we've created here in Portland.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How long has squash been part of the Portland community?

Barrett Takesian:

It really started taking off when a volunteer, Greg Bourne, just decided to bring some structure to a small league at the ymca. When I moved to Portland, I found a pretty robust group of adult players that were playing on converted racquetball courts at the Y. And it was everything great about squash, although there was the opportunity to grow that community and to make it more diverse and to use it as a tool to uplift youth in our city as well. So I got involved to bring that youth element, that diversity element, and the energy to Greg's organizational skills. And from 2013, when I first became involved, until now, we've become multimillion dollar nonprofit with a building and serving hundreds of kids in the Portland school system and hundreds of families that are enjoying the community as well.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Is this something that requires one to have a specific level of knowledge before going in? Do you have to have any skills at all?

Barrett Takesian:

Right. Absolutely not. So one of the first things we did was to put some beginner clinics in place just to make anyone feel welcome so that if we ran into anyone on the street, we could say, hey, we have a Tuesday night women's clinic at 6:30pm it's totally free. We have all the equipment. We have a great coach, Mary Lou Fortson, that's there to instruct. And then on Thursdays we have the men's clinic. So we encourage anybody to come by on at 6:30 on a Thursday night. We have all the equipment there, we run a great clinic, get introduced to it, and then we have a bunch of leagues and whatnot for every level. So that if you want to become involved, we facilitate all those introductions for you. Anytime someone comes into our facility. You know, our membership's really attractive, but we're quick to tell them this is our real mission about uplifting first generation college seekers and any student in Portland that wants to be part of this program. So we encourage all of our members to volunteer and our members volunteer a couple hundred hours a week, not each, but collectively as mentors, tutors, coaches, cleaning the facility, you name it. So it's that community vibe that we're trying to make clear every time we have someone new into our space.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How many people do you have currently involved in this?

Barrett Takesian:

Well, our committees alone are probably 75 to 80 people, spanning from development to real estate to junior program committees to events. We have big parties and outreach as well. So we have a huge network of dedicated volunteers running the organization. Then from a membership perspective, we have 200 memberships, but 100 of those are families. So probably are serving about 400 individuals that are using the space as their own. And then we serve about 120 students a week in our facility across our elementary school, middle school, high school programs. And as we start sending students to college as well, we're supporting our students that are in college as well as so on any given year, we're working with about 200 youth as well.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How many students have you successfully gotten into a college at this point?

Barrett Takesian:

Well, one of our first students was Devin Case, who just graduated from Casco Bay High School and he was with us at the ymca and so he's the oldest student in our program. So he is a freshman at SMCC right now. He works almost full time on our staff as well, coaching the younger students and running the facility. And then he's interested in doing a wildlife biology major at either Western Ontario University or Umaine Oro. He'll get into either one, I'm sure. He's an extremely hard working kid, so he's the first one to have gone all the way through. But the real goal I'm working towards is in five years, we want to be the number one youth development program in the state of Maine. And it's really going to take that long to start working students through our full curriculum, which is an hour of squash, an hour of fitness, and an hour of academic support every day after school. So back then when Devin was with us, I used to tell the kids, listen, we used to be an entirely volunteer run organization run out of those dark courts at the ymca. I told the kids, you know, the level of programming is a 2 out of 10 right now. But you're part of this because we're trying to build a 10 out of 10 program. So I would say we're about six months away from a 10 out of 10. We're probably eight out of a 10 right now. Working out the choreography of how students flow through practice, why they think they're there, the ownership they feel over the program, all these intangibles that need to be in place to build this culture of excellence. And then once we're at a 10 out of 10, it's five years of being in a 10 out of 10 program that you start thinking, okay, you know, Harvard or one of these elite universities is a place that I could excel. And so when you walk into our facility, we have college banners hanging over every inch of the space. And from fourth grade all the way through, you're thinking big, you're thinking about goals, and you're trying to find those two things, passion and community. Because we think those are the two things that'll carry you all the way through.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

In your mind, what does a 10 out of 10 program look like?

Barrett Takesian:

Well, first of all, a 10 out of 10 program, a staff is just there to help and guide the students, really run it. So I have organizations that I look up to, one in particular, Squash Busters in Boston. And when a new student goes into that program, they're greeted with a handshake by an older student. The second they walk into the door, they look to the older students, see what's going on, and the students are what's driving the culture. It's not the staff. So for us, we're putting these programs in place and these expectations. We talk about respect, effort, and positivity, and we track those things in every stage of practice. Kids are flowing through an hour of hard work on court. They're doing an hour of fitness or yoga, and then they're flowing into our classrooms for academic support after practice, as well as right now. It's the coaches that are reminding students why we're doing this, what our values are, why hard work is so important. But you only have to be. You only have to be that broken record for a couple years until your students are the ones that start telling that message. And that's when you know you really made it, because the students have a much stronger voice than their coaching staff when it comes to influencing peer behavior.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You said that you're a multi million dollar nonprofit. Why are people so interested in supporting a nonprofit that centers around squash?

Barrett Takesian:

Well, when I say a multi million dollar nonprofit, I'm not talking about our annual fund, because Portland doesn't need a lot of multi million dollar annual funds we have. You know, we're all, we're all doing our best to meet our annual fund goals. I'm talking about our balance sheet and the initial rounds of capital we were able to raise to put a sustainable program in place for what we hope will be the next hundred years. So when I was in the community meeting with people about why you want to support Portland Community Squash, I talked a little bit about that culture. We're going to create a culture that's going to perpetuate excellence and results from students that might not otherwise have after school activities. So the return on investment in terms of shaping youth in the city was there. And we had proven models and we had a proven track record of working with youth here in Portland at the Y. So we promised that, but we also promised a really sustainably operated nonprofit. And one of the, one of the talking points I use when meeting with our first supporters was this is crazy, but we just met and I'm already talking about a capital gift because we were crazy. We started with a capital campaign. Not many organizations would do that, but we were really confident in what we in our plan. So I said, I'm asking for a capital gift. But what you're building is a really sustainable community because our membership creates a lot of recurring revenue. So half of our annual budget is through earned revenue. And that just takes a huge load off of the organization and the time of our staff. So as an executive director, most of my peers that are other executive directors are spending their whole day out in the community fundraising. But I really don't have to do that anymore. I'm in my sweats right now because I'm on court every day day with our students. I'm helping run yoga and fitness in the classroom. And to be an executive director and to be able to be part of that frontline programming staff is. Is really unique. But that's just to show the point that by thinking a little bit more creatively about how we can have mixed uses in our space, it's really freed us up to be this really efficient organization that spends all of our time working on our youth and not so much having to worry about covering our administrative and facility expenses.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It sounds like you've really been able to tap in to a variety of different interests that you hold. You're doing some coaching, some teaching, some fundraising, some business work, some directorial duties, Many, I'm guessing. So when you were going through high school and college, did you have a sense that you would have so many different interests that you'd be able to tap into?

Barrett Takesian:

No, I've always been a really passionate person and gotten really excited about working on projects and working in teams. When I was working on those economics problem sets, I promise you, I didn't have most of the answers. In fact, I had very little. But. But I was the person in the team that knew where the different skills lied around me and was able to smile and let a group, have a group take me in and work on a problem set and keep morale high and learn as I was going, too. So when I translated that into working on a project, it was really about the strengths of the people around me. So I said, hey, I'm going to bring the smile, I'm going to bring the work ethic, and. But I don't know anything about real estate taxes or zoning or fiduciary responsibilities. So just the community really rallied behind the project and we were able to put an amazing team in place. And yeah, I guess I was that conductor that was just saying thank you a lot and making the requests that had to be made and following up and keeping everybody on task together.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You recently bought a condo here in Portland, and you said that it's important to not only have this place that you're going to move into, but also it's important to have a place where you can practice your faith.

Barrett Takesian:

Oh, yeah. Well, that's funny that you interpret it that way. It's actually very true. But. So the synagogue I was referring to as the Sharifila Synagogue, which is the new home of Portland Community Squash, where I practice my faith, is the back Cathedral at St. Luke's Church on State Street. So my faith doesn't exactly align with the history of the building, but it's the same God. I suppose Jesus is a little bit of a different conversation when looking at Judaism and Christianity, but, yeah, these. My faith, too, is also in community as well. So that synagogue at 66 Noye street has been a place for celebration and mourning and faith for more than 50 years, since 1955. And the same is true for every church, synagogue, and mosque and other communal faith space in Portland. And it's really sad. I saw on Instagram that another synagogue had a deconsecration ceremony coming up. And those places used to be where community collected, and we have fewer and fewer of those spaces now. So we're just really thankful that at Portland Community Squash we could preserve that space as a place that would be a place of celebration and support and community. And for me, yeah, to me, that's that's just as influential as making it to a Sunday service once in a

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

while at St. Luke's so you are actually, you're. You're actively practicing what you believe in?

Barrett Takesian:

Yeah, yeah. In every aspect of my life right now, I feel very fortunate.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What would you like to see happen with Portland Community Squash in the next 10 years?

Barrett Takesian:

I can see the potential energy in the space as we have these amazing stories of students that have taken themselves all the way through adolescence. And my mentors, my high school squash coach, we just celebrated his 100th birthday party. And so 72 years of working with youth and you couldn't imagine a better end of life. You know, he had James Taylor sing a song for him because he used to teach James Taylor when he was a kid and Deval Patrick was there, you know, the governor of Massachusetts. So it's not that. It's not that it's the remarkable students necessarily that make it special, but just the outpour in the amount of people that you can support through your lifetime. So I'm just so excited to watch, to try to create this culture that's so positive in students lives, to see them come through. And then the nice thing about having an adult membership, too, is that hopefully they'll come back to Portland, make their own stamp on Portland, and be members of Portland Community Squash and be able to see the next generations of kids come through as well. So it's really a lifelong offering that we're offering to our community, and I'm just excited to be in a position where I can watch generations of people come through that program.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I've been speaking with Barret Tekesian, who opened the community center at Portland Community Squash in January of 2017. He currently serves as the president and executive director. Thank you so much for the work that you're doing and thanks for coming in.

Barrett Takesian:

Thank you for having me.