The Longest Rallies in Squash History

Longest Rallies by Number of Shots

The record books for squash's longest rallies are dominated by Scottish charity attempts, where players keep a single ball alive for thousands of consecutive strokes. Here are the most notable marks by shot count.

Scottish number-one Lisa Aitken and veteran Mark James set the Guinness World Record in a charity event at Montrose Squash Centre. The rally beat the previous mark by 198 shots and was logged as 3,606 consecutive strokes.

Their first attempt fell short at around 2,000 strokes before they went again and broke the record. Mark James is a serial record-breaker who had earlier held the mark at 3,408 shots with Peter Buchan in 2017.

That earlier rally, before Aitken's record, saw Montrose players Peter Buchan and Mark James sustain 3,408 shots over 1 hour 22 minutes 40 seconds during a Comic Relief fundraiser. It stood as the world record until 2019.

In Jammu, India, squash coach Krishan Sharma and endurance athlete Vickrant Mahajan set a Guinness World Record with a continuous 1,098-shot rally. It began at 8:50 am and ran 33 minutes 4 seconds, surpassing the prior record of 1,003 shots.

Under the record guidelines for that attempt:

• Neither player could hit the ball twice.
• The ball had to stay in legitimate play, above the tin and inside the out lines.
• It could not bounce twice before being struck.

The record they broke belonged to Ron Matthews and Andrew Pearce, who held the Guinness mark for the longest rally, 1,003 shots, from a July 2014 attempt in London. No match time was recorded for them, but their feat was also a Guinness-sanctioned record attempt.

Longest Rallies by Duration

Ranked by elapsed time rather than shot count, the same marathon efforts top the list. The Aitken and James rally is the longest by both measures.

Aitken and Mark James sustained a single rally over 76 minutes (1h 16m, 3,606 shots) during the 2019 Montrose event. By contrast, typical professional tournament rallies last only seconds, which makes this an extreme endurance feat.

The Jammu rally of Mahajan and Sharma, at 33 minutes 4 seconds (1,098 shots), remains one of the longest continuous rallies recorded in squash, far longer than usual competitive play.

These charity records are single, non-stop rallies, which is different from the longest professional match by duration. The longest match in professional squash history is Leo Au's 170-minute win over Shawn Delierre at the Holtrand Gas City Pro-Am in Medicine Hat, Canada, on 24 January 2015, with the fifth game alone lasting about 78 minutes.

Within a single competitive rally, the longest recorded on the PSA Tour came at the 2025 Goodfellow Classic in Toronto, where Tom Walsh and Kareem El Torkey contested a rally lasting 7 minutes 41 seconds. That gives a sense of how far the charity marathon rallies sit beyond normal match play.