Time, Tricks and Travel: How Business Shapes a Professional Squash Player's Career

Even before playing collegiate squash at Drexel, Matias Knudsen BSBA finance ’22, MBA ’23, had his sights on playing professionally.

Now, a few years into launching his pro career, he’s finding that his business studies and his athletic career have proven to be complementary.

Knudsen spends much of the year traveling the world to enter tournaments held by Professional Squash Association (PSA), the governing body for men’s and women’s squash.

Take this example, from a mid-May check-in from Ireland: “Since March. I’ve been in Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, the Netherlands…”

He lists other stops – Cleveland, New York – but says Egypt was the real standout: home to many top-ranked players and the CIB Egyptian Open, with the transparent squash court set up within view of the Great Pyramids.

“It’s a lot of traveling and a lot of seeing what tournaments to play and where to go,” he says. “I’m making a lot of late decisions and late bookings, but I’m okay with it, because I love it. This was always my dream.”

Since graduating from Drexel and deciding to pursue professional squash full-time, Knudsen has climbed the ranks of international squash players; when he checked in from Dublin in May, he was ranked 42nd in the world.

He ranks even higher in terms of social media following: he has the most followed account among players on the PSA Squash Tour. Outside of his professional matches, he’s built a substantial online following as a trick-shot artist, doing things with just a racket and a ball that prompt double-takes.

When he first started posting these videos, around when he went pro, his follower count was more modest, but his tricks would garner tens of thousands of views. “I thought, let me make this a bit more professional,” he says. “I started to grow with it and to learn what works best and what doesn’t.”

A native of Bogota, Colombia, Knudsen splits his time between Bogota and Philadelphia, when he’s not traveling to a tournament and does much of his training at the Arlen Specter U.S. Squash Center, located on Drexel’s University City campus.

John White, head coach of Drexel men’s squash, coached Knudsen during his student career and saw what he could become.

“His dedication and work ethic are second to none,” White says. “He’s always set these goals and he’s on track to achieve them.”

White recalls a time when trick-shots were more of a part of Knudsen’s on-court game. Your opponents, White says, “would get used to it, and then they’ll know it’s coming. You’ve got to have a Plan B.”

“He knows he can’t play that way now, and he’s much more knowledgeable about the sport and the culture.”

At the conclusion of his collegiate career, Knudsen was recognized as a 2023 Semanik Award winner, given to Drexel’s top female and male senior student-athletes who best exemplify the scholarship and athletic ideals of Drexel’s former Director of Athletics.

“Drexel taught me everything I needed and more for me to be able to pursue my career: not only professionally as a sports player, but also treating it almost as a startup. At the end of the day, it’s a business I’m running. It’s performance-based, and I’m both the operator and the product.”

A sport-business course, taken during his MBA studies, tasked him with devising a business plan for a third-division team in a lesser-known sport. He then applied some of those tactics to what he admits is something of a “niche” sport, primarily played in private clubs. To launch his career, he had to, in his words, “find an image, try to leverage that image on tour and get sponsors.”

“I had to think, how am I going to make myself unique to new people?” he says. “It gave me perspective on so many things that I was able to put out a really good product.”

That product – his on-court performance – has brought him tournament wins and a steadily increasing world ranking. “It’s very rewarding to see the titles and the rankings,” he says. “First, breaking into the top 100, then the top 70, then 60… breaking top 50 was major, and really emotional for me.”

The next milestone he’s looking to reach is a top-20 world ranking, and with that accomplishment, he would have his sights on 2028. That’s when squash makes its Olympic debut at the Summer Games in Los Angeles, where he hopes to compete for his home country.

Beyond questions about fitness or technique, though, Knudsen regularly confronts key business questions in shaping and supporting this career: How can I make my pitches better? How can I offer more value?

“Every sponsor I’ve gotten was through the image and likeness I generated on tour,” he says. Sponsors, he adds, “know where I’m ranked, and I represent them at the biggest stage, but beyond that, I’m giving them 100,000 views per video. For them, those are potential customers.”

As his career takes shape, Knudsen hopes to stay connected with his alma mater and to find opportunities to mentor student-athletes: whether they’re playing racquet sports or other ones, whether they’re looking to go pro or just make the most of their college careers.

At Drexel, he says, “the more I grew up, the more I realized how important studying and that sort of mental development is. Your studies really can help you become a professional, because it builds your mind in a way where you can run your own business.”