By Bill Alden
Combining his passions for computer science and squash, Dhruv Panchal has created an innovative analytic tool to break down matches for players and coaches.
Panchal, a rising Princeton Day School senior, has developed ParamSquash, a service by which clients can upload squash match videos and then receive detailed analytics on player movement, shot placement, and tactical patterns.
In putting his website together, Panchal brought years of computer experience to the project. He started on robotics in kindergarten and then moved on to coding.
After starting to create websites, Panchal did an internship with Yogi which helped hone his skills.
“Yogi is a sentiment analysis company where you would get tons of reviews on different products on Amazon and compile that together,” said Panchal. “You try to use the learning to pull out common sentiments and then you use those algorithms. I worked on trend analysis to pull out what people generally think.”
In the meantime, Panchal took up squash in seventh grade and started competing at the club level. He came to PDS as a sophomore and last season played at No. 2 for the Panther boys’
squash team.
It was a request from his club coach in the summer before Panchal started high school that began the process that ultimately resulted in ParamSquash.
“My coach wanted me to do groundwork getting the statistics of where I was hitting,” said Panchal.
Initially, Panchal would follow the ball as he annotated match videos. He switched his focus to read the players instead.
“I used the conventional computer vision techniques to go look in the background and see where the players are pointing,” said Panchal, noting that he was sometimes spending two hours a day during the week and all day on weekends fine-tuning the model. “If the players are both pointing here one guy has his racquet up, the ball is probably near. The player tracking wasn’t that hard. The research had been done and I used models to track each player.”
By the spring of 2025, Panchal perfected his analytic model and started marketing the service to high schools, colleges, and clubs.
In order to get the analysis, which costs $1 per order, one uploads a match video or pastes a YouTube link to paramsquash.com. The model then uses its AI to process the match, tracking players and every shot throughout the match automatically. The client then receives a detailed breakdown with grids of movement, shot patterns, and tactical insights.
There is a quick turnaround on the breakdown. “I will run my model and for every minute of video, it will be a minute and a half of processing time,” said Panchal. “For a 30-minute video, you will get it back in 45 minutes.”
In order to drum up business, Panchal cold-emailed high school, college, and club coaches. The service has drawn quite a following including Princeton University men’s squash, the University of Virginia, Columbia, Penn, Amherst, Vassar, and PDS, among others.
“It is lot bigger than I ever expected, I think the biggest thing is the price,” said Panchal, noting that there is another squash analytics service that charges $99 a video. “In the peak of the season I make $250-300 a week. Now that it has slowed down; it fluctuates from $50 down to $10.”
A meeting with one of the leaders of SquashSmarts, a nonprofit that helps underprivileged youth in Philadelphia to play squash and get into college, helped motivate Panchal to make his service affordable.
“I have been annoyed at the barriers to squash,” said Panchal, noting that he offers the service without charge to nonprofits. “You have to pay for your club, you are going to have so much costs for travel and racquets. It is not really catered to anyone not making that much money. Since this film review is one of the barriers I could break down, I figured I might as well do it.”