Category: Squash Shoes

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We Sell Wide Court Shoes

YONEX SHB 65 ALPHA WIDE RED
Yonex Power Cushion 65 Alpa Wide

If you do a quick internet search, you will see that there are a lot of brands offering “wide” court shoes. However, if you have wide feet and if you have ever ordered any of these “wide” shoes, you will already know that very few of these “wide” shoes are actually wide.

So what should you do if you either know or suspect that you have wide feet?

The very best thing you can do is to come into our store and allow our experts to fit you properly. In our experience, most players — especially guys — are wearing the wrong shoe size. They think that court shoes should fit either like their walking-around-shoes or, worse yet, like their hockey skates.

Court shoes are neither. If you are a normal person, you don’t suddenly stop and change direction at high speed in your walking-around-shoes. You also don’t turn your feet sideways to stop in your court shoes like you do when you are stopping on skates.

Many of the customers we fit on a daily basis suffer from blackened toe nails. This is a sure sign their court shoes are too short. Many more deal with chronic foot pain, which is often a sign of shoes that are too narrow or long past worn out.

How can you tell which of these two is causing your pain? Start with some simple math.

Competition grade shoes today are designed to last about 500 kilometers. On average, racquet sports players cover approximately four kilometers per hour. So a competition grade court shoe will last a maximum of 125 hours of court time — less for recreational grade shoes and much less for budget grade shoes.

If you play once a week for two hours, competition grade shoes may last a year. If you play twice a week, they will last about half a year. But if you are buying recreation grade or budget grade shoes and playing frequently, you are looking at replacing your shoes every two to four months.

The grade of the shoe makes a difference, too, of course. Competition grade shoes are designed to take maximum abuse. Recreational grade shoes don’t last as long as competition grade shoes, but are generally more comfortable. Budget shoes are neither. They are not designed for comfort or durability. Budget shoes are intended for teenagers who will outgrown their shoes before they wear them out.

So in determining what might be causing your foot pain, you must consider both the grade of shoes you are wearing and the amount of game time you have been wearing them. But if you have good shoes that are reasonably new and you are still experiencing foot pain (without blackened toenails), there is a good chance that your shoes are too narrow for your feet.

How wide is wide and what is actually available?

Athletic shoes for men come in a variety of standard widths. B is for narrow feet. D is a standard fit. 2E is wide. 4E is extra wide. Not all athletic shoes are suitable for court sports, though. So while it is possible to find running shoes in all four of these widths, options in court shoes are severely limited and none of the major sporting goods stores even offer them.

Forget about B in men’s court shoes. There is no such animal. If you are genuinely a B width male, you will have to look into women’s court shoes. We have never seen a men’s court shoe available in a B width.

Unlike B width, 2E is not impossible to find. Some brands, like Victor, offer unisex shoes in 2E width. In women’s shoes, 2E is extra wide while for men 2E is just wide. However, in our experience there just aren’t very men who fit comfortably into 2E shoes. More than 90% of the men we help with wide feet are actually 4E.

The good news? Of all the non-standard width court shoes, 4E are the most widely available. That being said, nobody should imagine that 4E shoes are commonly available. They are not. In fact, they are very far from common and you will almost certainly have to go to a specialty store to find some.

Yonex Canada typically offers one model in 4E per season. Other court shoe brands are less committed but may offer a 4E every once in awhile. Asics, for example, offers running shoes and a couple of lines of cross trainers in that width but nothing specifically 4E in a court shoe. Victor offers some unisex shoes in 2E, but rarely stocks an actual 4E. Everybody else offers either standard D width or D in a relaxed fit, which can be forced onto a 2E foot, if nothing else is available.

Here in Calgary, every racquet sports player knows that Racquet Network is the best place to go for court shoes. We carry the most models in the most sizes. We carry more colours and more wide shoes than anybody else. So if we don’t have it, you can assume that it probably isn’t available. For players with genuinely wide feet, this statement is even truer than for people with standard feet.

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Size 14 Court Shoes Calgary

Racquet Network carries Calgary’s largest selection of size 14 court shoes for men. In fact, we have the largest selection of court shoes of all kinds. Come in for a fitting with our experts and leave with the perfect fit for your feet. We are open 7 days a week. Monday to Friday 10:00am to 8:00pm. Saturday and Sunday 10:00am to 5:00pm.

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Size 15 Court Shoes in Calgary

Racquet Network carries Calgary’s largest selection of size 15 court shoes for men. In fact, we have the largest selection of court shoes of all kinds. Come in for a fitting with our experts and leave with the perfect fit for your feet. We are open 7 days a week. Monday to Friday 10:00am to 8:00pm. Saturday and Sunday 10:00am to 5:00pm.

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Choosing Squash Shoes

Squash Shoes
Come into our store and get some advice from our experts.
Whether or not you choose to have a designated pair of shoes just for squash (squash shoes) or a general pair of shoes that you use for multiple indoor racquet sports (indoor court shoes) is entirely up to you. The principles remain the same regardless of the decision you make.

Squash Etiquette

Squash etiquette (which is backed up by rules in most facilities) requires players to wear clean shoes with non-marking soles. This means that the shoes you play in should not be the shoes you wear while traveling to or from the squash court.

Outdoor shoes are not squash shoes; they are not squash shoes because they are dirty. Dirty shoes make dirty courts. Dirty courts become slippery courts and slippery courts are dangerous courts to play on.

Shoe Selector For a full list of shoes in this category, please check out our ONLINE SHOE SELECTOR. You can sort by sport, gender, brand, size, weight, balance and more.

Not Suitable for Squash

Basketball shoes are not squash shoes either. Nor are cross-trainers or running shoes. Almost without exception, black-soled shoes are not suitable for squash.

Badminton shoes or racquetball shoes can be substituted for squash shoes. However, tennis shoes are not squash shoes and should not be used for squash under any circumstances.

Gum Rubber Outer Soles

Squash shoes and indoor courts shoes typically have outsoles made of a blend of synthetic rubber and gum rubber. Pure gum rubber is blonde in colour and soft to the touch; however nobody makes pure gum rubber outsoles anymore. Virtually every manufacturer now uses a blend of gum and synthetic rubbers that is soft to the touch and sticky on hardwood floors.

The first thing you should be looking for when shopping for indoor court shoes of any kind is soles that are soft to the touch. If the shoes you are looking at have soft rubber in their outer soles, they are made for use on indoor courts.

Shoe Selector For a full list of shoes in this category, please check out our ONLINE SHOE SELECTOR. You can sort by sport, gender, brand, size, weight, balance and more.

Things to watch for:

Shoes that are too short may cause you to lose a toenail. The repeated pounding of your toenail against the end of the shoe will damage the nail bed. Eventually, the nail will loosen and fall off.

Shoes that are too tight will cause pain when your feet swell. Keep this in mind when trying shoes on in the store. Remember that your feet swell during a typical squash match.

Shoes that are worn out on the inside will cause your feet to hurt the next day. If your feet hurt signficantly the day after you play squash, check the inside of your shoes for wear.

Rule of Thumb

Serious squash players replace their shoes in a season as many times as they play per week on average. In other words, squash players who play squash three times per week will replace their shoes three times per season.

Of course, not every player wears shoes out at an equal rate. Players who toe drag, for example, will replace their squash shoes more often than players who do not drag their toes.

Shoe Selector For a full list of shoes in this category, please check out our ONLINE SHOE SELECTOR. You can sort by sport, gender, brand, size, weight, balance and more.
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How to Pick Court Shoes

YONEX POWER CUSHION AERUS 3R COURT SHOE BLACK

Just about every day, somebody who comes into our store to buy court shoes spends more time looking in the mirror than they do listening to our experts about court shoes. This is unfortunate. Court shoes are not about fashion. They are about performance. With that in mind, these are what your priorities should be when shopping for court shoes.

#1 Traction

Without question, the single most important factor to consider when purchasing a court shoe is traction. Court sports require sudden changes in direction. Sudden changes in direction require one thing above all else: traction. Mess this up and you could get seriously hurt.

Traction is also the most important consideration for our court shoe buyer. He understands that our players need shoes with excellent traction. So he examines every shoe we purchase carefully to ensure that it will serve our players well. If the brand or the model don’t offer sufficient traction, we don’t carry it.

#2 Fit

It may surprise you to learn that fit is actually a more flexible standard than most people think. In fact, most modern court shoes are designed in a way that permits players to wear their actual size or even one half-size bigger. When problems start to occur is when players try (and about half of our customers do) to cram their feet into shoes that are too narrow or too short for their feet.

Shoes are not skates. The rule is this: if you want to avoid foot problems when you are old, wear shoes that fit when you are young. Your toes cannot be crowded; they have to have room to move up and down and even spread out a little inside your shoe. Also important: your circulation should not be cut off, especially on the top of your foot. If you crank your laces like you do when you are tying skates or ski boots, you are cutting off circulation to your feet. A shoe should fit like a winter glove, not a pair of yoga pants.

#3 Function

Most court shoes are multi-functional. For example, badminton shoes can work for squash, volleyball, tennis or pickleball. However, not all court shoes work well for all sports. For example, there are almost no Mizuno volleyball shoes that our experts would recommend to squash, badminton or pickleball players.

In order to figure out which shoes are right for your sport, you really need to ask our experts. Once you pose the initial question, they will ask you a series of questions back. Once they have your answers, they will be able to help you narrow down your choices.

#4 Brand

Brand is almost, but not entirely, irrelevant when it comes to choosing court shoes. “Almost” because there are a few brands that do not make court shoes, or if they do, do not make them very well.

Our expert advice to customers is to ignore brand completely. The reason for this is simple. Too many customers get tunnel vision when it comes to brands. As a result, they end up buying shoes with inferior traction or shoes that don’t fit right or don’t function properly just because they want a particular brand. Teens and tweens are the worst for this. All too often, their top priority in court shoes is brand — not traction, not fit, not function.

#5 Style

Customers in our store often have the luxury of choice when it comes to style. Unless their feet are unusually large or unusually small, we will usually have plenty of shoes in stock that offer the right amount of traction in the right size and for the right sport. After that, it becomes a matter of choosing brands or styles to help narrow down their choices.

Unfortunately, customers with wide feet or other special needs, will never have the same style selection available to customers with “normal” feet. Wide court shoes are extremely hard to find and when our buyer does find them, they are usually bland. So if you have wide feet, focus on traction, fit and function only. Forget about brand and style. Those shouldn’t matter to you at all.