Back in 2019, I saw a cool graphic showing the slow change over time of rankings of some IT thing; maybe it was market share of browsers or ranking of cell phone providers. After digging in, I found the site (Flourish.studio) and, what do you know, you can upload your own data. I created visual racing bar charts showing the Men and Women’s top 10s since the beginning of the tours in 1974, and those posts were one of the most popular I ever did.
@JT R Ball reached out this week and asked if I had thought about updating them … and I said, “Hey What a great idea!”
So, without further ado, here’s the two graphics, updated to the current rankings on both tours for the 2025-26 rankings.
Men: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/1113648/
Women: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/1120539/
Quick data caveats, since, well, this is Racquetball and no good deed goes published on the internet without someone complaining about it:
– These are End of Season top 10 lists. If you are a player who was ranked in the top 10 for a few weeks in a season 20 years ago and don’t see your name … don’t @ to tell me the data is wrong. Nobody captured mid-season top 10 data and I have no way of showing anything other than season ending top 10 ranks.
– In the The first few years of the tours, Basically there wasn’t a rolling ranking. The champions were determined by who won the season-ending Nationals event. That’s why the first few years look weird; i just took the Nationals finish and kind of jury-rigged a top 10.
Some fun facts:
– in 2019, there had only been 79 distinct players in the history of Pro racquetball to finish in the top 10 in any season. That number has now risen to 94 through this season, as we’ve had a ton of new faces make top 10 debuts in the last 5-6 years. Moscoso, Acuna, Jake, Montoya, Natera, Portillo, Adam, Carter, Martell, Trujillo? All new within the last few years, along with a slew of others.
– Same info for the Women: in 2019 there had been 97 women who had a top10 finish … now that number is up to 106. We haven’t really had that many new women debut that high in the last half decade. Gaby, Laime, Manilla, Barrios, Centellas, and this year Lotts is in the top 10.
Happy Friday. As always, if you can think of a cool application of this data that I should do or think about i’m always open to it.
You rock. Full stop.