I was asked to calculate the demand for squash in the U.S. in a recent interview. I’m not too familiar to the sport but I gave it a go. I first got the entire population of the U.S. 320 million. I then segmented by age taking out people that are less than 10 and more than 70. That already leaves us with 232 million people( Out of those I came up with a criteria of rarely play squash, occasionally play squash and frequently play squash.  

Rarely play squash = 2 time a year 

Occasionally play squash = 12 times a year 

Frequently play squash = 4 times a month or 48 times a year. 

I’m just a little confused on how to segment per population here. What would be the right assumptions to make? 

Let me give an example that —> There are 1 million people that play squash occasionally, 250,000 that play squash frequently and 100,000 that play squash frequently. Now squash is a 2 person sport so you always have to be playing with someone else. So divide all those numbers by 2 because 2 people will be using the court at the same time. 

I’d also assume an average squash game is 2 hours. So in this case numbers are the same 

1 million hours are played by rarely 

1.25 million hours are played by the occasional 

4.8 million hours are played by the frequent players. 

7.05 million hours of squash are played. 

Now if the normal squash court is open from 10:00 to 22:00 every day and the average game is 2 hours they can host 5 games a day per court which makes it 1825 games per year. 

If we divide 7.05 million by 1825 that equals 3825. If I had to to this without a calculator I could round up 1825 to 2000 as it’s still slight less than 10% and that would give me a clean 3500. 

How did I do?

(editiert)