Hamza Khan

On 23 July 2023, a seventeen-year-old from a village outside Peshawar became the first Pakistani in thirty-seven years to lift the WSF World Junior Squash Championship — the same trophy Jansher Khan had last carried home in 1986.

Hamza Khan was born on 2 November 2005 in Peshawar, into a family already woven into the fabric of Pakistani squash. His maternal uncle, Shahid Zaman, was once ranked World No. 14, and the great Qamar Zaman is a close relative. The court was less an ambition than an inheritance.

He picked up a racket seriously at nine. By eleven he had taken the Chief of Air Staff U-11 title, an early result that earned him a call-up to the Pakistan Air Force squash programme in Peshawar — the same pipeline that once produced Jahangir and Jansher.

His breakthrough came in Melbourne in July 2023. Seeded outside the top eight, Hamza fought back from a set down in three separate rounds before defeating Egypt's Mohamed Zakaria 11-9, 3-11, 11-6, 12-10 in the final. The victory, front-page news across Pakistan, was celebrated by the Prime Minister and framed by every major paper as the moment the green shirt returned to a stage it had once owned outright.

In 2025 he doubled up as Asian Junior U19 champion on home soil in Islamabad. He has since crossed into the senior PSA World Tour, breaking into the world top 100 for the first time in August 2025 — Pakistan's first man inside that mark in more than a decade.