I write this kind of tongue in cheek, but I got a (possibly spam) email from the website feedspot.com stating that our blog has been named one of the “Top 10 Racquetball blogs” on the internet.
I kind of laugh at this because … well as you might imagine, there’s not a ton of us actually doing Racquetball Blogs. The first two blogs mentioned are JT Rball’s Daily Racquetball and Evan Pritchett‘s Racquetball Blog, which are basically the only other blogs i’m aware of. #4 is the Reddit feed.
But … maybe we’ll have more blogs and more content being generated soon.
Syosset was the last Tier 1 of the season, and as noted in the previews for this event, the #1 spot for the season was technically in the balance heading into the event. Kane Waselenchuk entered the Syosset event with a 132 point lead over #2 Rocky Carson in the year end title race. They had both opened up a massive gap even to the #3 ranked player; nearly 700 points separated #2 and #3 heading into the event, and that gap has only widened after the event. So Syosset was all about determining #1 for this year.
By winning the event, Kane has now distanced himself by a sufficient amount of points from Rocky to have ensured himself the year end title. This post explains why (at least as I understand the system), and talks about the rest of the top 10 ramifications.
As the tour standings now sit, Kane leads Rocky by 234 points. This is roughly 100 more points of a lead than he had heading into Syosset, due to the difference of 100 points between winning a Tier 1 event (400 points) and losing in the final (300).
Now, there are still multiple events left on the IRT schedule between now and the end of June (notionally the end of the season each year); I postulated before the Syosset event that those events could actually come into play if the results went a certain way this past weekend. Players get 120 points for winning IRT Tier 2 events … and there are two Tier 2s still on the schedule (Costa Rica in two weeks time and Chihuahua Mexico in Mid June), at least one of which i’ve heard Carson is scheduled to attend.
So why can’t Rocky go win both of those Tier 2s and get 240 additional points to overtake Kane for the title, since he trails by 234 points? Because the tour only takes each players’ best 9 results for the season … and a potential 120 point Tier 2 win would not be enough to replace any bad results for Rocky this season. Plus, for the final season rankings players drop their lowest tournament result (which for Kane would be a 0 point missed event). Rocky made the semis or better in ALL NINE IRT events this year, guaranteeing him at least 220 points per event. So Rocky actually cannot improve his current points totals one bit from where they are now, hence Kane’s insurmountable points lead.
So, Congrats to Kane on his 13th pro title (click here for a season summary for Kane’s career: http://rball.pro/C08BD1) and Rocky finishes 2nd for the ninth season in his career (click here for the same for Rocky: http://rball.pro/610C77).
Once all the rest of the tourney slate plays out, I’ll capture the official season ending standings and update the database and links to show these results.
———————————– Now, how about the rest of the top 10? What did Syosset do to their rankings and what remains to play for?
So, there’s a couple of noteworthy rankings achievements to work towards besides the #1 title for the rest of the tour: – the top 4 players on tour avoid the seedings flip – More importantly … the top 8 players get protected seeds into the 16s at tier one events. – less important; finishing in “the top 10” as a career achievement.
I know there’s lots of complaining about protected seeds on tour, especially in a tournament like Syosset with 49 guys in the draw and some players potentially having to play 3 matches to face a rested, seeded player in the 16s. I’d rather not get into it here, just noting that there were several reasons it was implemented and remains in place today: see this link http://www.proracquetballstats.com/…/guidry_post_roundof32.… for a good summary of why it was put in and how it actually *helps* lower ranked players instead of hurting them, both in terms of prize money and rankings points.
Nonetheless, while the protected seed system is in place, players really want to stay in the top 8.
Here’s how the Syosset event results shape the current top 10, and what may happen with the remaining non-Tier 1s:
– By virtue of making the semis this past weekend, #3 Alejandro Alex Landahas locked up #3 on the season. He has a 142 point lead over #4 and cannot be surpassed even if Parrilla plays tier 2s and wins them to replace his lowest scores. Landa finishes #3 for the second year running and had a nice solid run in the 2nd half of the season to get there.
– #4 Andree Parrilla should have guaranteed himself the #4 spot for year end by making the semis. This is a pretty remarkable one-season rise for a player; he finished ranked 11th last season, basically playing the tour just half time. This year though, he played all 9 events, made four quarterfinals and four semifinals and was a couple of unlucky points from doing even better. Twice this season Parrilla went out in the tie-breaker 11-10 or else maybe we’d be talking about him fishing 3rd.
– Andree’s lead over #5 Alvaro Beltran is only 107 points. And, Beltran missed the first event of the season, meaning he could possibly win a Tier 2 and add 120 points to his year end total to over take Andree for the #4 spot. But … Alvaro played (and won) the Lou Bradley Tier 2 earlier this season (see http://blog.proracquetballstats.com/…/lou-bradley-irt-tier…/ for the wrap-up of that event), meaning he’s already got a 120 tier2 win on the books, so I’m not sure how much Alvaro can improve upon his current #5 ranking with the remaining events. Alvaro did miss the first Tier 1 of the season, meaning in theory that’s a zero-point result he should be able to “replace” …
– With his early upset loss this past weekend, Daniel De La Rosa dropped to #6 on tour for the season, his lowest season-ending ranking since the 2012-13 season. He’s just 50 points behind Alvaro though for the #5 spot, and missed not one but two events on the year, so he could improve his year end standing markedly by playing (and winning) some of the remaining lower tier events. But I wonder what motivation there would be for DLR to go out of his way to play non-tier 1s just to try to improve from 6th to 5th. If he was planning on playing (say) Costa Rica, or Chihuahua, or the smaller events in Arkansas and Kansas already so be it, but with his likely focused on outdoor events and pickleball and family for the summer, we may not see him again on the IRT til the opener in August/September.
– There’s a huge gap from #6 to #7; 420 points, really showing how the guys in the 3-6 range have separated themselves from the pack, similarly to how the 1 & 2 guys have separated themselves even from #3.
– #7 Samuel Murray picked a great tournament to hold serve and make the quarters as per his seeding; he retains a 70 point lead over #8 Franco and is probably locked into that as a year end seeding.
– #8 Sebastian Franco was upset in Syosset, but so were all his possible competitors to the last coveted protected seeding #8 spot, meaning he’s in line to retain it heading into the next season. Franco also is a very active player, having two “extra” events on his resume already being dropped, so I’m not sure how much he could improve his ranking with the remaining events, or if he’d even travel to them (Franco skipped the Bolivian Grand Slam, likely for travel/family reasons, and traveling to Costa Rica/Chihuahua may also not be in the cards).
– #9 Rodrigo Montoya Solís was upset before the 16s thanks to a brutal draw (having to play Javier Mar to qualify for the main draw) and could not move from his #9 seeding in Syosset in the standings. Montoya missed a couple of tier 1s early in the season, but has himself played a couple of non-Tier1s this season, so i’m not sure if he can improve upon the 100 point gap between himself and the coveted #8 spot at this point without a deep dive into his full results on the season. Maybe if he goes to Chihuahua and wins it he could slip into the top 8.
– Both #10 Mario Mercado and #11 Jose Diaz got upset early in Syosset, costing them any shot at moving up. Despite his big run to the quarters as a #12 seed, Jake Bredenbeck remains locked into that year end seeding. #13 David Horn made the main draw but got no further and stays ranked #13 for the season.
– After #13, there’s a size-able gap to #14: Luis Conrrado Moscoso Serrudo, who has all his points from just two events (the Bolivia grand slam and a non Tier 1), and who seems unlikely to be seen on the regular tour at this point. I’d love to see him get some sponsors … but regular flights from Bolivia to the US are pretty grueling and we may not see him again til the US Open.
– The Guys ranked 15th-20th are all within 100 points of each other. Gerardo Franco Gonzalez, Jansen Allen, Lalo Portillo, Thomas Carter, Adam Manillaand Robert Collins. I’d describe all these guys similarly; they play nearly every IRT event, sometimes get upset early, and are still mostly lacking that one big run to the semis where they get a couple of solid wins in a row over top 8 guys that they’d need to really kick start their rankings. Some of these guys are moving up in the world (especially Portillo), while others are slipping (Allen), and it’ll be interesting to see how next season plays out for this crew.
———— So that’s it. Hope you enjoyed, and I hope i didn’t get any of this analysis egregiously wrong 🙂
Kane doesn’t lose very often, so we do a post dedicated to it.
I wanted to do a quick post reacting to Kane Waselenchuk‘s shock loss last weekend in the quarters of the Florida pro stop to Alvaro Beltran , and then talk about the implications heading into the season’s final event.
Kane’s loss is historically notable for a number of reasons.
– This is Kane’s first on-the-court, non injury or forfeit related loss since a semis Kansas City loss to Jose Rojas in 2013. Some may also point out a loss Kane took to Jake Bredenbeck in May of 2016, where Kane won the first two games, suffered an injury, then retired in the 5th. See this link for all of Kane’s career losses: http://rball.pro/8F1B46
I’d like to point out how crazy it is that we’re talking about a singular loss by a player in a one-on-one sport. Roger Federer is widely considerd the GOAT in Tennis; his best ever season by W/L was in 2006 when he went 92-5. That’s 5 losses in a year … while Kane doesn’t have 5 losses in the last decade. This situation kind of reminds me of the Russian wrestler Aleksandr Karelin, who went 13 years without losing (nor even dropping a point!) a match, and when he did give up a point it was so shocking that the officials went to video replay to confirm the referee’s decision.
– this loss breaks a 74 game winning streak; http://rball.pro/D30B92 . This was the 2nd longest ever Game winning streak, 2nd only to Kane’s 113-game winning streak that covered the whole of the 2016-17 season. This loss includes the first game loss Kane has suffered since the conversion to best-of-3 scoring format on tour.
– this loss also breaks an 83 match winning streak: http://rball.pro/569297 . This was the 3rd longest ever such streak (which skips fft losses), 3rd only to two longer streaks that Kane has achieved earlier in his career.
—————— I did not see the match live; only seeing texts and notifications after it had happened, so I went back and watched it on International Racquetball Tour‘s facebook page (tangent; what a great resource, having all these past matches available at the click of a button).
I watched it end to end, to see if there was evidence of an injury or some other root cause for this shock loss. Kane definitely seemed “off” his game, both in this match and against Thomas Carter in the 16s. And in a sport where the margin of error against top pros is usually measured in millimeters, it was enough to give Beltran (a very skilled shot-maker who can put balls away at any point when he can set his feet) the openings he needed to win.
I thought Kane really struggled with his serve on the day; I can’t recall the last time I saw him leave drive serves coming off the back wall as easy setups (which Beltran dutifully buried), and I can’t recall seeing him miss his lines or skip so many shots that he’d normally roll out.
I’m no pro, but I can tell very quickly when getting onto the court if i’m “on” or “off” that day, and sometimes there’d just nothing you can do about it except try to work around whatever struggles you’re having. These guys play day in, day out for 8 months out of the year and their livelihoods depend on maximizing their talent without allowing for “off days” really, so its hard to criticize one particular outing versus another.
——————— Implications for the 2018-19 race heading into the Syosset event.
Next weekend’s Syosset event is the final tier 1 of the season. However, there’s four additional IRT non-tier 1 events listed on the schedule right now: https://www.irt-tour.com/events/ . Two of those are Tier 2s, which give 120 points to the winner (no small amount of points, given the analysis below):
https://www.irt-tour.com/singles-rankings/ has the current rankings, post Florida rankings and Kane has a 134 point lead over Rocky Carson for the season. The Syosset event is “new” and there’s not corresponding points from last season to “defend,” so its winner takes all here on out.
With a 138 point lead, Rocky basically has to finish two “rounds” ahead of Kane while advancing sufficiently deep this coming weekend to keep the title lead. Here’s scenarios that could result in this situation: – Rocky wins (400 points), Kane loses in semis (220 points): this is a net +180 for Rocky, enough to take over the title lead – Rocky makes final (300 points), Kane loses in qtrs (150 points): net +150 for Rocky, enough to take the lead. – Rocky makes semis (220 points), Kane loses in 16s (90 points): net +130 for rocky … NOT enough to take the lead.
Here’s where it’d get interesting. It is close enough between Kane and Rocky that some of these lesser tier events may come into play. Lets say Rocky or Kane comes out of New York trailing by less than 100 points: if you win a Tier 2, that’s 120 points. There’s two Tier 2s remaining (in Costa Rica and Mexico), a Tier 3 in Kansas, and a Tier 4 in Arkansas.
There are some limitations as to how many non tier 1s that top pros can go to. I don’t know the exact details. Kane went to the PAC Shootout earlier this spring (a Tier 4) and won it. Has Rocky gone to any non-tier 1s this season?
– In the final, he topped Rocky Carson (6),14,2. But the evolution of that final score was pretty fascinating to watch: o Moscoso got out to a 6-0 lead. o Carson scored 15 unanswered to win 15-6 in game 1. o Carson got out to a 10-3 lead in game 2, at which point it looks like Carson is going to cruise to an easy 2-game win. o Moscoso came all the way back, saving a couple of match points o then Moscoso cruised to the 11-2 tiebreaker win.
So basically the final was a series of three huge streaks: o Moscoso was 6-0 in points to start the game, then Rocky took a TO. o Carson then went 25-3 in points o Moscoso then went 23-6 to finish the match
I found this to be a pretty amazing set of streaks. As an outside observer, I thought Rocky tired in the tie-breaker while Moscoso got energized. There were several balls left up that I just don’t think he had the energy to get to and he didn’t adjust to the lob-Z that Moscoso settled on to run off point after point. Age, altitude, and court time (it was Rocky’s 8th match on the weekend) all perhaps contributing factors … as well as the letdown of Rocky being in complete control of the match and letting Moscoso take Game 2. But hand it to Conrrado, who found another gear, just as he did in the 11-0 tiebreaker win over Landa in the quarters.
– Moscoso becomes the 40th ever IRT pro tournament champ. He joins Charlie Pratt, Alex Landa , Sebastian Franco, and Andree Parrilla as first time IRT tour winners in the last two seasons. He also joins an interesting group of one-tournament winners in the IRT’s history, which includes Ben Croft, Rich Wagner , Mike Guidry, Tim Sweeney, and outdoor legend Brian Hawkes.
– He becomes the first Bolivian to make a final, let alone win a tournament. He’s the second South American to win a tournament (Sebastian Franco was the first), and just the third South American to make a final ( Mario Mercado and Franco being the first two). Its only the fourth time in IRT history that a Bolivian has even made the quarters; The first ever was MoMo Zelada making the Quarters of the Nov 2015 Atlanta, then Zelada made another quarter a few months later, and Moscoso of course made the 2017 quarters where he lost to Kane.
– Moscoso represents just the 5th ever country to have won an IRT event: USA, Canada, Mexico, Colombia and now Bolivia.
– Moscoso beat the #1, #2 and #3 seeds en route to winning the event. That’s kind of hard to do. The only real way to do this is to enter a tournament as a specific seed that feeds into either the #2 or #3 seed early and then beat the #1 seed in the final. Moscoso entered as #23, which played into the #10, #7, #2 seed quarter. Jack Huczek also accomplished this when he won his first event as the #10 seed in Jan 2002 in Boston. And Kane Waselenchuk , when he won as the #39 seed, also ended up taking the same seed “line” as Conrrado did, beating #26, #23 and #10 to qualify, then #7, #2, #3, and #1 to take the title.
– Moscoso, as the #23 seed, becomes the 2nd highest seed on record to win an event. He trails Kane Waselenchuk , who won his first tournament back after his 2-year hiatus in Sept 2008 as the #39 seed. These two are also the two highest seeds to even make a final, and #23 is the 3rd highest ever known seed to make a semi (Rodrigo Montoya made a semi as a #29 seed in one of his first ever pro evets).
– Conrrado wins a pro event in just his 3rd ever pro tour appearance, which is by far and away the fewest appearances prior to winning that has ever been seen. I’m not sure we’ll ever see this again, unless there’s some international phenom who basically wins the first ever pro event he plays. Here’s some of the other fastest known runs to a first title: o Kane, Cliff Swain and Sudsy Monchik all won their 7th ever pro appearance. o Marty Hogan won his 8th appearance. o Jack won his 13th ever appearance.
You can run this analysis by selecting any player then running the “Player Firsts..” report. It will give their tour debut, first win and the number of tournaments inbetween (along with ages at each event).
—– Anyway, hope you enjoyed some stat-based facts about Moscoso’s big win! Hope to see him more on tour in the future.
I just wanted to let you know that, due to the demand for the previously hard-to-find report called “Tale of the Tape,” I’ve put a direct link at the very bottom of the main Report Selection page for you to call it yourselves from now on.
From the www.proracquetballstats.com home page, select your tour (IRT, LPRT or WRT), then at the very bottom of the list of available reports (but before all the static HTML links) there’s a direct link to the Tale of the Tape. It calls another front end where you can select any two players to generate a Tale of the Tape report.
In case you’ve never seen it, its modeled after Boxing preview graphics (hence the name) and has a picture of each player, all the available demographic information I have on them (age, home town, social media links, sponsors, etc), plus Career Won Loss records, # of tourney titles and year end titles, and at the bottom a full detailed match history between them on the tour in question.
If I’ve got incorrect data or am missing a picture for a player, please let me know and I’ll update data.
Andree Parrilla is part of two of the best family-pairs in the sport’s history.
Here’s a fun one to discuss during this slight break in the rball tourney schedule; what’s the best Father/Son combo in our sports’ history? How about Husband/Wife or Brother/Sister?
Here’s some opinions on each category from yours truly, with others that I considered. Did I forget someone? Am I totally wrong? Feel free to chime in.
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1. Best Husband/Wife combo: Jack Huczek and Christie Van Hees Only husband-wife team where both sides have won tour championships. Both retired way too soon; I would bet money Jack in particular could still be making the back end of pro tournaments if he was still playing (he was born in 1983, so hes younger right now than Kane/Rocky/Alvaro).
There’s actually a slew of Racquetball playing couples with pro experience on both sides … i limited this to just the best and the top 3 honorable mentions. If you want to include the Pratts, Fowlers, Wachtels, Kirches, Hawthornes, or others, I wouldn’t blame you.
Another category where there’s lots of honorable mentions; I left out the Paraisos, the Doyles, Kerrs, and Odegards in particular. I sense there’s a lot of younger players in the junior ranks that could qualify here too.
Lots of good examples of brothers playing right now. Bredenbecks, Murrays, Kurzbards, Garays, Kellers, Acunas, etc. And there might be more in the Latin Americas that i’m not aware of, since there’s so many players with common surnames.
I thought of a few other father/son combos where at least we knew both sides played at a high level (examples: Schopiearys, Ullimans, Elkins). But I couldn’t think of a single instance of a top pro from our entire sport’s history who has a son playing at a high level right now.
Father/Daughter combos are hard to come by … but not as hard as the last category.
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8. Mother/Son: literally the only example I could find where a mother and son both had pro experience is … Goldie Hogan and Marty Hogan.
That’s right: Marty’s mother entered a number of the very earliest Ladies pro draws in the early 70s at the same time her precocious son Marty was starting to win events as a teen-ager.
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So, did I miss anyone? Do we have any top pros with younger kids making their way up the junior ranks?
Editor note: I mistakenly thought that Armando Landa was Alex’s father; they are brothers. This post has been edited following corrections.
Steve “Bo” Keeley in his prime, about 40 years ago.
Editors Note: this post is not written by me; i’ve cut and pasted this story from the author with his permission and request. As you can read, I tried to help Keith in this journey as best as I could, and with the help of quite a few old-time racquetball players he was able to find answers.
Its a good read and a great testament to the strength of our racquetball community. I highly suggest spending a few minutes reading this story about Keith’s search for his birth father, how it touched more than a few of us in the sport past and present, and the great things that Keith now has in his life going forward.
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My name is Keith Koons and I was born in Vero Beach Memorial Hospital on June 17th, 1973. Up until this past year, that was the sole connection that I had to my birth parents since I was adopted at just three days old. I spent a large majority of my life wondering who my parents could actually be, even though I was never the type to really stress over those types of details. I had a great life growing up and countless great friends- [my] adoptive parents are amazing people who gave me everything they could in life.
So to me, this always felt more like a great mystery that would be fun to solve. Who am I? Where did I come from?
Unfortunately though, there was simply no way to solve it without obtaining a court order after a costly battle with the state. So I spent 45 years of my life wondering- does my mom still think of me from time to time? Did my dad even know that I existed at all?
One other little wrinkle to my story is that mom had an affair while separated from her husband. She was young with a small child and a family of her own, still trying to figure things out in life while making her marriage work. Once the pregnancy became known, the husband presented her with an ultimatum- have an abortion or file for divorce. My mom took “option C”, which was to move out on her own, deliver a healthy baby boy into the world and then place him up for adoption…even though it was the toughest possible choice.
Unfortunately, to this day I don’t know what happened next. Did the husband ultimately forgive her? Was my real dad around at all for support? There’s just no way to know.
In the Spring of 2018, a client of mine called and asked if I’d be interested in staying with him in LA for the week to help work on marketing for his upcoming book. At this point of my life I had been working as a freelance copywriter for almost a decade, and I was slowly trying to transition over to being a full time ghostwriter since I love telling stories. So I jumped at the chance to help my friend Steven Griffithwhile taking in the LA culture.
As the week drew to a close, Steven said that he wanted to give me a gift for all my hard work- a DNA kit from 23 & Me. I’ve always been too humble to be an avid gift recipient so I protested at first, but then told Steven a little about my adoption story and how I had always wondered. I was a big guy in high school, 5’ 11” and 220 pounds of lean muscle, but I also had speed as an athlete and an IQ that bordered on genius level.
Could my dad be a professional athlete? That always nagged at me not knowing.
Once he heard my story, Steven absolutely insisted on the DNA kit and I finally relented. After all, I did want some answers…but the prospect of finding those answers was terrifying. I mean, what if my father was a criminal or a legitimately bad person? Did I even want to open that Pandora’s Box and risk the glimpse inside? It might not make a lot of sense on the outside looking in, but sending off that DNA kit was one of the bravest things I have ever done in my entire life.
Once the results arrived, I found links to thousands of relatives with a lineage tracing all the way back to Ireland and beyond. I was Irish? Although it means nothing, it was also the discovery of a lifetime looking over my family tree for the first time. I went from knowing nothing to having thousands of years of ancestry, and I can’t really express in words what that felt like. I experienced every emotion in the spectrum as I absorbed every last piece of knowledge that was available.
The closest relative that I found was a 5% DNA match, making him a 2nd cousin or a 1st cousin once removed (meaning, it was a cousin right around my mom’s age). I reached out and we chatted briefly, but this cousin was in poor health and couldn’t really give any insight. It was mostly a dead end at the time.
About a month later though, I receive a message from 23 & Me in my inbox saying that new relatives have been found. I’ve learned over time that these are just standard monthly emails with no significant meaning, but this one in particular changed my entire universe- there was Greg, a 22.8% match to me that made him my half-brother.
And poof- my mind was 100% blown. Almost 45 years of searching and I find my brother through an app? It felt so random that it was almost impossible to process.
Of course, I immediately reached out and discovered that Greg was also adopted, but his mother knew his birth mom personally and he had extensive details on our father. Most of the written stuff was lost, but Greg told me that our dad was a world championship racquetball player named Steve and he travelled the US in the 1970’s. He couldn’t remember his last name though- and looking back it made this journey 1,000 times more special.
You wouldn’t be reading this today if it wasn’t for that one oversight.
Since I’ve worked as a writer a good portion of my adult life, I instantly hit the net researching world champs from the 70’s named Steve. I came up with a few great candidates on the Pro Racquetball Stats website but quickly realized that I needed an expert in my corner. So on a whim, I sent an email to the site briefly telling my story and asking for some guidance. And within a few days, Todd Boss replied with EXTENSIVE detail on every pro Steve from the 1960’s, 70’s and beyond.
Our leading candidate was none other than Steve “Bo” Keeley, one of the best athletes to ever step on a racquetball court and often considered the forefather of the modern game.
The racquetball connection with my father absolutely meant the world to me because it was one of my favorite pastimes as a teenager. While I never played in serious tournaments, I absolutely fell in love with the game my freshman year in high school since it was a killer cardio workout while having a lot of fun at the same time. I was on an indoor/outdoor racquetball court daily for almost a decade, so discovering that my father could potentially be one of the best that ever played flooded me with emotions that I didn’t know were possible- I was an absolute wreck trying to decide what to do or how to process these details.
For those of you who haven’t kept tabs on Steve Keeley (he now goes by Bo), he’s lived an adventurer’s lifestyle since stepping off the courts in the late 70’s. He went to veterinary college for several years and picked up multiple degrees, but I got the feeling that he simply missed the open road too much. He never was able to hold down a job for more than a few years without getting that itch to head out on a grand adventure.
Since racquetball didn’t have huge sponsorships back in the early 1970’s, Steve and other tour players would often hitchhike between destinations or even hop trains. And during these travels, Steve met countless hobos that would travel the world on mere pennies while living off their charisma and good fortune. Steve was drawn to this lifestyle because it represented everything great about America in that era. While some would view hobos as bums, Steve saw them as the richest men among society because of their true freedom.
Steve eventually settled down in Slab City a number of years ago, which is our country’s last true outlaw town. You can find stories from Steve online discussing accounts of murders, meth-head zombies, the art of robbing your neighbors and too many other unsavory concepts to discuss. Yet this was Bo’s paradise since it was the closest version to the American Dream that he’s been chasing for the past 50 years.
As I’m reading all of these facts on Bo, I’m thinking to myself that there’s no way I could reach out to him- he lives among rapists, drug cartels and murderers. But I did see that he was semi-active on Facebook and couldn’t resist taking a chance- I sent a 3-4 paragraph introduction explaining why I believe that he’s my father. And for the next month, all I heard back was crickets…I figured that he’d never reply. Until he did.
Bo messaged me saying, “I had a vasectomy years ago and don’t have any children. Don’t message me again.”
And just like that, I was heartbroken. My dad wants nothing to do with me and he won’t even acknowledge his son (or sons for that matter, let’s not forget about Greg). So I decided to just let it go and consider that it was the happiest possible ending I was going to get.
Only, Todd Boss contacted me again a few days later with additional news. He told me that there weren’t any pro racquetball tours in the Vero Beach area in 1972, so Bo wasn’t as solid of a candidate as we thought. Since he was hopping trains back then there’s an outside chance that he had a layover in that area and met my mom, but it sure didn’t feel like an ironclad fit. Maybe we were looking at the wrong world champion named Steve…
Then came the golden nugget of wisdom from Todd that I desperately needed- had I considered amateur players? They could also be known as world champions within their circles.
Unfortunately, Todd’s site didn’t have statistics for amateur play back in the 1970’s, but he agreed to keep searching while asking a few of the top pros if they had any ideas. This story is as much Todd Boss’s journey as it is mine because he went so far above and beyond for a complete stranger.
But the more I searched, the more I realized that the racquetball community from the 70’s and 80’s is a family in their own right, with everyone happy to help and reminisce during my own journey.
My friends, I talked to dozens of the best early players that had ever picked up a racquet and these were folks calling me out of the kindness of their heart, super eager to step in and provide assistance however they could. Every contact led to five more people to talk to, with more calls and emails flooding in by the hour.
I truly felt like racquetball royalty in that stretch and eventually decided that my search was finished- all of these great professional athletes were my new family. It just didn’t make sense to keep searching since I had ultimately found something even better than I was looking for.
Before I could completely close the book on my adoption journey though, there was one email left to send- Bo Keeley. I messaged him apologizing for what must have been a shocking email a month before, and I told him Todd’s new theory of my dad being a top amateur. And Bo replied almost instantly with two messages- first claiming that he could in fact be my dad (he wasn’t) and second, to introduce me to one of his friends named Scott…a Florida amateur player with a photographic memory that definitely would have met my dad.
Truthfully, I can’t tell you how the next few days unfolded. There were dozens of emails from Bo, Scott, Todd and others, plus I knocked out countless research on my own.
Through that process I eventually found my dad- Steve Chapman, a world champion amateur that was born and raised in Vero Beach, Florida. It was bittersweet though because Steve had passed away over 25 years ago from a brain tumor.
I will add this though- Bo and several others told me that my dad was right on the verge of being a professional. He had every shot in the book down pat but even more importantly, he was a fantastic athlete that would simply outwork you on the court. Even in series where he was clearly outmatched or outclassed, he would push you to the point of exhaustion and slowly creep back in the match.
However, there were a few more wrinkles to this story. While I was researching Steve Chapman, I found an old newspaper article that interviewed his nephew Shane in the late 1990’s. Steve was Shane’s idol growing up and he grew up fascinated by his accomplishments, taking up the game at an early age and quickly becoming a top-ranked amateur himself. Shane still travels Florida to this day playing in local tournaments.
My first phone conversation with Shane was awesome- we have a lot in common and instantly shared a bond. As I was hearing his story though and picturing my dad mentoring him, it was probably the only time in this journey were I let jealousy get the better of me. I couldn’t help but think, “Man, that should have been my life…why did Steve take that from me?”
The feeling quickly passed though because as I said earlier, I really don’t have any complaints how my first 45 years turned out. I really can’t name a single point of my life where I wasn’t happy.
I did get to drive down to Vero Beach to meet Shane and a few other relatives in person this past Fall, plus I still chat with Bo Keeley from time to time about whatever he currently finds interesting in life. Bo has unofficially adopted me as his son and since he’s currently working on a book about Slab City; we will possibly get together in the next few months so I can help him edit it. I’ve introduced Bo to an agent as well…the same agent that handled my friend Steven Griffith’s book out in LA at the very start of this story.
If the first Stephen didn’t buy me that DNA kit, I never would have had two dads named Steve in the racquetball hall of fame. How ironic is that? My journey literally went full circle in the span of four months.
What does this story mean? I don’t know…nothing. Everything. It’s the story of me but it’s also so much more than that because of my ties to racquetball and all the fantastic people I’ve met along the way. Bo Keeley is one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met in my life and I’m proud to think of him as my dad- I think we’ll become great friends in the waning years of his life. He’s still in fantastic shape though and walks miles daily through the desert- he’ll probably outlive us all.
Steve Bo Keeley is completely free and living life 100% on his own terms- there’s something all of us can learn from his unconventional lifestyle.
I also owe a massive “thank you” to Todd Boss- I promised to write this story for his readers since it was the only thing I could think of as a pitiful form of compensation for his countless hours of research. I’ve never met him in person or even talked on the phone, but Todd will always be my brother from here on out. Maybe he didn’t think of his help as a big deal but it was absolutely life-changing for several of us.
The one final chapter to this story is my half-brother Greg. He was a basketball prodigy in high school with multiple division I scholarship offers. Unfortunately, he fell into the wrong crowd and he’s spent most of his adult life in and out of Florida prisons. He genuinely seems like a good person at heart though and he’s moving in with me next month, so I can teach him marketing and show him a different path in life. If you’re the God-fearing type, maybe throw a prayer or two our way as my family helps him start a brand new chapter in life.
Who knows, I may even bring him out to the racquetball courts with our cousin Shane so he can see where we actually came from. After all, the sport is definitely in our blood.
To the entire racquetball community- from all the former world champions to aspiring players who just bought their first racquet last week, I want to say thank you for being a crucial part of revealing my life’s story. All told, I spoke with over 50 current/former players and each of you were absolutely amazing. Under different circumstances, I would have loved to document all the incredible stories that were shared about your life on tour, the camaraderie among professionals and just great memories.
I was simply in a state of information overload at the time and couldn’t process it all…but I do want you to know how much I genuinely appreciate each and every one of you. So thank you, my friends, and please don’t hesitate to reach out if there’s anything I can do to ever return the favor.
Quick post to talk about some of the “sausage making” behind Pro Racquetball Stats. The site generates very long URLs to call reports, which is good and bad. Its good in that I can cut and paste URLs directly to data, which I couldn’t do for years, and you can “edit” the URLs to quickly pull up a different report without going back to the selection page, but bad in that the URLs are long, complicated and often get truncated or cut off when cutting and pasting in posts.
Earlier this year, Wayne Saucier (who designed the UI/UX updates to the site and who figured out we could even do the URL posting in the first place) had a great suggestion; register a “short URL” service and utilize it for these direct links into the system instead of the longer URLs i’ve been using. As it turned out, “rball.pro” was available so we grabbed it. Wayne then built a short-URL generation service for the rball.pro domain.
I’d like to announce the first implementation release of this service officially. Now, instead of using a URL like this:
I’ve been incorporating these short URLs into posts for a few weeks now; i just wanted to make an official announcement and recognize Wayne’s efforts.
Furthermore, we could eventually use rball.pro for non ProRacquetballStats.com URLs too; for example, here’s a rball.pro link that goes to the very long r2sports.com URL for the Lewis Drug singles pro bracket: http://rball.pro/D344CC . Just like other “short URL” services (bit.lybeing the most popular), anything can be shortened through Wayne’s code.
In fact, we hope other Rball associations may like this service and make use of it themselves in the future.
We hope this makes reading PRS posts and navigating our content a little easier going forward. Eventually we will incorporate rball.pro throughout the site more completely as a service.
Thanks to Wayne for the idea and the work on this!
At the turn of the New Year, I thought it’d be interesting to list out some of the Usage stats of the site in general. I started hyper-tracking the Reports being run in January of 2018, so this is basically a year’s worth of results. I’ve also got the site hooked into Google Analytics, so i’ve pulled some fun data from there as well.
Here’s a Usage summary for the site in 2018.
– 33,357: the number of unique Reports executed in 2018. That’s an average of about 2,800 per month.
– 5,728: highest number of reports run in a month, back in April of 2018. Probably b/c that was the end of the IRT season and we thought Kane Waselenchuk was retiring.
– Users: Google says we had about 4,300 distinct users throughout the year. A peak was seen in Early Sept, just ahead of the first IRT event of the season, when we had more than 150 concurrent users at one time in the site.
– Acquisition: the site pretty evenly gets its visitors via three methods: direct linking (where people type the URL right into the browser), through Organic Search (googling) or handoffs from Social Media (facebook mostly, but also some twitter).
– Top 5 countries: USA (80% of the traffic), then Canada, France (?), Mexico and Bolivia. France is the weird outlier there. Within USA, top states: California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Virginia (where I live, and run up traffic as I develop and write). Top cities within Mexico are Chichuahua, Nuevo Leon, San Luis Potosi, Mexico City and Baja. Top provinces within Canada: Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba. Top areas from Bolivia: Santa Cruz, Cochabamba, La Paz.
– Platform Usage: About 52% of calls come from desktops, 43% from Phones and the rest from Tablets. This makes sense to me; i’m old school and use a desktop to develop, and the reports are often very data rich and don’t render well on phones.
– Report most often run: the “all_matches_per_event” report, which lists all the matches for an individual event. That report accounts for 15,000 of the 33,000 total executions. I generally put this link into every event wrap-up post I do, so it makes for easy click bait.
– Most infrequent Reports run: there’s a few reports, believe it or not, that have never been run. Some of the IRF reports are pretty infrequently run, probably b/c there’s only a couple of IRF events per year. Not too many people run OT Games, or All Forfeits, or the various “Highest Seeds to make a ..” type queries. That’s ok; they’re not going away 🙂
– What players are queried the most? Here’s the top 5 names that are queried right now in the database: Kane Waselenchuk, Paola Longoria, Rocky Carson, Alejandro Alex Landaand Jake Bredenbeck. I suppose none of these are really a surprise in that they’re the top players on all the pro tours.
– Most and least by “tour?” No surprise here: IRT is the most queried report, followed by LPRT and WRT. The 4th most queried tour is the IRF Match database, followed by Juniors and Amateur events. The least queried? WRT Doubles, with just 86 reports called out of the 33k total executions.
– 1,450: the number of Players in the Player Profile table. This is well below the total number of distinct players in the database; there’s more than 1,700 men in the IRT database, 630 in the women’s database, but its the Amateur, IRF and Junior databases that really explode out the profile data and where more work is needed.
Anyway, hope you found this interesting. I’ll revisit this data in a year’s time to see how things have evolved.
Hello all. Every once in a while, someone runs a report on the Pro Racquetball Stats website that exposes a bug. Data, coding, logic, etc. I thought i’d tell you about some of the bugs i’ve found and fixed lately, now that we’re getting a lot more attention, and hopefully highlight some reports you may not have known about in the first place.
If you were ever interested in the sausage making behind the page … then this is for you.
Here’s some bug-fixing logic done lately.
1. Miscellaneous Player Stats bug: this was exposed when people noticed that the site made it look like Kane Waselenchuk had never lost when winning the first game in a tourney. Turns out I was accidentally stripping the () parentheses from the scores (to do counts and averages) before doing the “lost the first game logic.” So now the report works. Kane is exactly 498-5 in his career (as of Portland 2018) when he wins the first game. So that’s pretty good.
2. The “Oldest player to” report was failing recently. As it turns out, I had a bad birthday for a player in my Player Profile data, which corrupted the age-calculation logic, which crashed the report. duh. I fixed the birthday, re-uploaded player profile data and it works. I call this the Ruben Gonzalez was amazing” report; he qualified for a main pro draw two months shy of his 60th birthday (!).
Coincidentally … I now have more than 1,400 players in my Player Profile database, many with birthdays and other biographical information. I’m always looking for more data. If you’d like to update your data DM me. I also put up this form here that submits data automatically: http://www.proracquetballstats.com/…/player_profile_submit.… .
3.The Longest Game winning streak had an odd result in it. As it turns out, the loop logic for capturing game winning streaks was not properly accounting for qualifying CURRENT games won streaks. I noticed this while demoing the code; we were taking Kane’s current games won streak (which sits at 48 games as of the end of the Portland 2018 event) and “assigning” it incorrectly to the next player alphabetically in the player database. Whoops. So we fixed the logic to push in any active streaks properly. See the report now:
http://rball.pro/7B48E4
Kane is working on the 8th largest ever consecutive games won streak, which is now all the more difficult to increase because matches are best of 3 instead of best of 5. If the IRT had been playing games to 11 all this time, he’d likely be in the 64-straight game range right now.
4. Speaking of Winning streaks, did you know that Kane’s on somewhat of a large match winning streak right now? As of the end of the Portland event, he’s now won 70 straight on-the-court matches (as in, ignoring no-shows and complete forfeit losses where he did not take the court). Problem was, the report wasn’t showing it properly. The reason ended up being the way I coded his Sept 2018 loss in Laurel; the code wasn’t picking up the “wbf-ns” code I used. Fixed the code, and now he shows a current 70-match non-forfeit winning streak, good for 3rd best all time.
http://rball.pro/C55F76
5. I fixed a small re-direction bug; when you show all the match results for an event, there’s a button that redirects you to the Quarters/Semis/Finals report for that season. Well, in the doubles side … my Q/S/F report can’t show the doubles results for that many players b/c it’d be way too wide. So now instead, if you click on that button you get a list of all the Doubles FINALS for that season. Here’s all the doubles finals from the 2017-18 season report as an example:
http://rball.pro/D0A3AA
6. I fixed a couple of random data entry errors I’ve seen here and there. I prepare a spreadsheet and essentially “predict” the tournament from start to end and sometimes I forget to correct the winners and losers in the staging XLS, which results in data entry errors. I also find weird transcribing results from historical tourneys every once in a while and have to go back to the magazines to fix it. Today I had to pull up issues of Killshot from 1992 to fix some tourneys from that era.
7. Lastly, I added the season-ending points to the Season Seed Ranks report to provide some context for the players’ results from that season. This data is only really complete for later years where I have full rankings and point totals. The current ranking system went into effect prior to the 2002-3 season and the point totals have been pretty consistent since. Here’s a link to this report for the 2017-18 season with the new points field shown:
