Status: Submitted to the Unicode Consortium in 2026.
The gap
Open the sports section of any emoji keyboard and you will find tennis, badminton and table tennis. Squash is not there. Squash players end up using the tennis ball instead, which is the wrong ball, the wrong racket and the wrong sport.
New emoji are approved by the Unicode Consortium, and anyone can submit a proposal as long as it follows their format and makes the case with evidence. So I wrote one and submitted it.
The case
Unicode asks every proposal to show that the emoji would be widely used, visually distinct, and not just a passing trend. These are the main arguments in my proposal:
- Usage. Squash joins the Olympic program at LA28. About 25 million people play worldwide, and the U.S. High School Team Squash Championships have grown from 16 teams in 2005 to more than 200.
- Completeness. Tennis, badminton and table tennis already have emoji. Squash is the one major racket sport left out.
- Not representable. A tennis emoji for squash is like a baseball emoji for cricket. The equipment, the court and the game are all different.
- Not a fad. The sport goes back to Harrow School in England in the 1800s.
Player and team figures are from ShareAmerica, U.S. Department of State (January 2026).
The design
An emoji has to be recognizable at 18 pixels. At that size a squash racket and a tennis racket look almost identical, so the design relies on two things that only squash has: the teardrop-shaped racket head with a long shaft, and the black ball with two yellow dots.
Unicode requires the artwork in color and in black and white, at 72 and 18 pixels. These are shown at actual size:
Getting there
I went through several versions before settling on the current one.
