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IRT 2019-20 Season Complete: Year End Rankings Analysis Part 1

Kane secures his 14th career pro title. Photo US Open 2019, Photographer Kevin Savory

The realities of the Covid-19 pandemic have come home for both pro tours at this point; the IRT, which held out hope that its last scheduled Tier 1 could be held in June has made the decision to officially end the season.

The rolling 12-month points for the players were frozen on 4/1/20 and remain frozen now; they’re now the season ending points. The tour made the decision not to penalize players with expiring points where there were no tournaments to play in which to make them up from Mid-March til now. Once the tour starts up again, we’ll see all the last few month’s of older points expire, making for an interesting start to next season. More on that in Aug/Sept.

With this post, the 2019-20 season ending rankings have been officially updated to the database. All relevant data has been loaded and all relevant links have been updated.

– 2019-20 year-end points in the system: http://rball.pro/B8C116
– Year End Pro titles list: https://www.proracquetballstats.com/irt/year_end_titles.html
– Running Tour Summary document updated (kind of an ongoing oral history document in bullet point format): https://www.proracquetballstats.com/…/year_end_summaries.ht…
– Number of overall titles: https://www.proracquetballstats.com/i…/number_of_titles.html

Meanwhile, here’s some of my favorite seasonal reports to run, and which i’ll draw heavily to write the rest of this post:

– Season Summary Report: http://rball.pro/8F437B
– Season Seed Report: http://rball.pro/553125
– Year End Ranking Matrix: http://rball.pro/E441EB

(the last one is a relatively new report; it shows all the current players and shows all their season ending rankings in one matrix; its pretty cool if you have not yet seen it).

—–

Congratulations to Kane Waselenchuk , who secures his 14th pro title in dominant fashion. He went 29-1 on the season (that one loss being a last-minute withdrawal in the season’s first event). Furthermore, he lost only one GAME on the season, that being a dropped game to Rocky in the Laurel final in September. Just eight times all season did his opponent even score double digits in a singular game against him. I’ve seen some speculation on FB about whether the tour is “catching up” to Kane Waselenchuk … i think its safe to say the answer is “No.”

He now holds a career .920 winning percentage and has won 123 of the 177 Tier 1 events he’s ever entered. In his age 38 season, he is as dominant as ever and shows no signs of slowing down.

See http://rball.pro/88FC92 for Kane’s match W/L record
See http://rball.pro/0AD532 for Kane’s Game W/L record
See http://rball.pro/67990A for Kane’s Career summary rpt
See http://rball.pro/9237E3 for Kane’s Player Profile page

—–

#2 Alex Landa ended a tumultuous season with a dominant lead over #3 Rocky in the standings, finishing #2 for his highest ever pro ranking. He secured his 4th career tourney win, made 3 other finals and 3 semis. It’s still kind of hard to believe he didn’t really tour full time until his age 29 season, when he suddenly rocketed up the rankings to hold his currently lofty status. Landa also switched country allegiances, won US National Doubles with partner Sudsy Monchik, and essentially guaranteed himself a spot on the US National singles team as well with his finals appearance in the national team singles qualifier in Tempe. Not a bad season.

See http://rball.pro/8B6B3D for Landa’s Career Summary report.

—-

#3 Rocky Carson was knocked from the #2 spot on tour for the first time in a decade, enduring a tough season where he underwent another knee operation. The rehab ended up costing him at least one missed event, and then he took another off in the midst of the 3-tourney midwest swing (a rarity for racquetball’s ironman). Two seasons ago, he made the semis or better in 8 of the 9 events; this year he got upset in the 16s or quarters five times as the tour has gained depth and he’s faced tough opposition earlier. He also got unlucky with early round match-ups: his round of 16 loss was to Moscoso at the US Open, and two of his quarters losses were to DLR, whose early season slide forced him into a lower seed than he is merited by his quality. That being said, Rocky’s in a great position to make a big run back up the board this coming fall and winter, as he won’t have many points to defend. Just making the semis or final at the US Open will be a huge points swing when it happens (or if it happens, as the US Open scheduling might be in flux). The #2 slot next season is shaping up to be a big dogfight.

see http://rball.pro/FCB94D for Rocky’s Career Summary report

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#4 Andree Parrilla edged #5 Beltran for the #4 spot by just a few points thanks to his performance at the season’s final event. Parrilla had lost the #4 ranking after holding it for much of the season, but made the semis in Chicago (perennially one of his favorite events) and ends the season #4 for the second year running.

How Parrilla got to #4 is pretty amazing; he endured a stretch in Jan/Feb where he was defeated in the 16s in three successive Tier 1 events and looked lost on the court. This is no disrespect to the players he lost to (in order Manilla, Mar and GFranco), each of whom are solid players and earned their wins. Parrilla also suffered a very early out in Mexican Nationals right afterwards, but rebounded to play strong in Chicago. He takes the #4 spot by just 40 ranking points (by way of comparison; you get 40 points for making the round of 32 in a tier 1) and trails Carson by less than 200 points for #3.

Here’s where things will get interesting next season: Parrilla has a chance to rocket up the rankings in the season’s second half, thanks to all these early round losses. If he turns three round of 16 losses into three semi final appearances? That’s a 400 point swing and may be enough to vault him to #3 or higher.

click here http://rball.pro/3C78A0 for Andree’s Career summary rpt.

—–
#5 Álvaro Beltrán as noted above gets edged for #4 and thus finishes ranked 5th for the third year running. More impressively, Beltran finishes his 21st straight year touring and he’s finished ranked 6th or better in 18 of those seasons (the other three being his debut season, and then two seasons impacted by a knee injury).

Beltran was able to navigate the landmines of up and coming players on tour all year, making the quarters or better in 9 of the 10 events he entered. He did not break into the semis once this year, the first time that’s happened since his injury season of 2009-10, But, he ends up edging his doubles partner DLR for #5 by the skin of his teeth, currently sitting just 15 points ahead of Daniel for #5.

In fact, just 212 points right now separate #3 Rocky from #6 DLR, meaning we will see some major jumbling when the tour kicks back up next season.

Beltran also qualified for the Mexican national team with DLR, losing a close singles final in February for the National title.

See here http://rball.pro/5D443D for Alvaro’s career summary rpt.

—–
#6 Daniel De La Rosa had a very interesting season, finishing 6th for the second successive season. To the outside observer, DLR may look like he’s fading; after all he was in the top 4 for five successive seasons leading into the 2018-19 season. But DLR’s season ended a heck of a lot stronger than it started.

He missed an event early, then was upset in the 16s in his “home” event in Arizona in October. He was knocked out in the quarters in both events in December and some thought he may be reconsidering touring altogether. But, he came back in January energized, making the final of the stacked Longhorn Open, winning the Lewis Drug, then winning Mexican Nationals. He lost a tough tiebreaker to Landa in the season’s last event, but the statement has been made. DLR will race up the standings with a strong start to the 2020-21 season, with fewer points to defend in the fall, and then will have to hold on next spring.

DLR continues to be a force on the outdoor scene too, winning the Men’s and Mixed Pro Doubles titles at both the 2019 Outdoor Nationals and the 2019 3WallBall Vegas event. DLR and Beltran continue to be arguably the top doubles team in the world, and DLR with wife Michelle De La Rosa are arguably the top mixed doubles team.

see http://rball.pro/A8C548 for DLR’s career summary report.

——
#7 Samuel Murray finished ranked 7th for the second consecutive season, having a very consistent season. He played to his seeding 6 times out of 10 events, losing in the quarters to higher-ranked opposition. He made two semis to offset two early-round upsets.

The Canadian #1 took both of his country’s qualifier events, securing his place on the national team once again. He also continues to be one of the top pro doubles players, playing most of the season with Landa.

see http://rball.pro/48CA0B for Murray’s career summary report.

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#8 Lalo Portillo rocketed up the rankings this season, finishing 8th on the season after being ranked 17th at season’s end last season. Touring full time for the first time, he qualified for the main draw 10 times out of 10, and got upset wins throughout the season to add a quarter, a semi and, at the Lewis Drug, making his first pro final. He lost that final to DLR 14,9, but his performance rewarded him with a 5th seed the next event.

Portillo has room to grow; once he got into the top 8, he suffered three straight one-and-dones at the hands of his immediate competition for the back end of the top 10 spots (SFranco, Montoya, Mercado), but held on to #8 in the end.

One last note; Portillo is easily winning the IRT’s unofficial off-season social media contest, frequently posting both serious and funny videos nearly daily. He’s a good follow if you havn’t already done so.

see http://rball.pro/24862F for Lalo’s career summary report.

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#9 Conrrado Moscoso committed to playing the tour in a significant fashion in the 2019-20 season, traveling up for long stretches of time from Bolivia to compete. He ended up playing in 6 of the 10 events and fared well.

He made the final of the sport’s biggest event, the US Open, playing a scintillating first game against Kane before losing in two He stayed in the country to compete the two following events, making a semi in Arizona and then losing to Parrilla in the quarters of Fullerton before returning to Bolivia. He came back for the 3-events-in-3-weeks stretch and got a lesson in the rigors of pro touring; he limped out of a quarter final against Kane, played well but lost to DLR in the semis in Sioux Falls, then got dominated in a one-and-done loss to long-time nemesis Montoya in Sun Prairie. He was ranked as high as 7th until he missed the final event, dropping him two slots to #9 where he ends the season.

The #9 seeding slot might be the worst one to have on tour; If everyone shows at an event he’ll have to play a qualifier, then beat a top 8 player in order to then match-up with Kane in a quarter. Its hard to earn points when you’re playing a major final quality match in the quarters. He’ll have his work cut out for him to move up next season; lets hope he can get the resources to play as much as we’d like to see him.

click here http://rball.pro/5E7B89 for Moscoso’s career summary report.

—–
#10 Jake Bredenbeck improves his year end ranking for the fourth successive season, and at season’s end just held onto his first ever top 10 finish over Franco.

Jake made his second ever career pro semi in Portland with wins over two top-10 pros, and nearly took out DLR in an 11-10 heart-breaker loss in Chicago. His season has a number of just misses that might easily turn into wins next season.

Off the field, Jake is leading the charge on a new clothing line called Beastmade Apparel, with t-shirts, hats and now long sleeve pullovers. Support a fellow rballer and buy some gear.

click here http://rball.pro/F31CDD for Jake’s career summary report

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Since I tend to be a bit verbose, i’m breaking up this season ending rankings analysis into multiple posts. That way we’re not reading 5,000 words in one clip. Stay tuned for the next set of players in the rankings and my thoughts on their season.

——
tags

International Racquetball Tour
International Racquetball Federation – IRF
Pan American Racquetball Confederation – PARC
UnitedHealthcare US OPEN Racquetball Championships
WOR – World Outdoor Racquetball
USA Racquetball
Racquetball Canada
Federación Mexicana de Raquetbol
Federación Boliviana De Raquetbol – Febora
Federación Boliviana de Racquetball
Racquetball Colombia
Federacion Colombiana de Racquetball
Reaching Your Dream Foundation

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LPRT 2019-20 season Officially Complete

Longoria secures her 11th pro title. Photo US Open 2019 by Kevin Savory

With the last potential scheduled LPRT event on the schedule cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the LPRT has officially declared the 2019-20 season complete.

This is our season-ending post for the Ladies Pro tour.

Now updated at www.proracquetballstats.com for the end of the season:

– 2019-20 Rankings online: http://rball.pro/5DC5C8

– LPRT Tour History in bullet points: https://www.proracquetballstats.com/…/lprt_tour_history.html . Updated for the end of hte season

– LPRT List of Year End title winners: https://www.proracquetballstats.com/…/lprt_year_end_titles.…

——
A note about the points at season’s end: there’s a rolling 12-month period of points, and then a season-to-date points total. In some cases they do not show the players in the same order. Thanks to the sudden end of the season there likely will be a decent reshuffling of player seeds upon the restart of next season. Where it mattered, I’ll note it in the write-up below.

See https://www.ladiesprofessionalracquetballtour.com/rankings for the current Singles rankings online.

——
Congrats to Paola Longoria, who secures her 11th year end pro title. She went 32-1 on the season, winning 7 of the 8 events she entered and making the final in her sole loss (in Virginia in September of 2019). Her career W/L record on tour is now 472-31, an astounding 93.8 Winning percentage. She holds 99 tier 1 titles plus an additional six satellite titles for 105 pro titles for her career. She’s just turned 30 and seemingly has many more years of dominance ahead.

——
Here’s some analysis of the rest of the top 10 and beyond.

– #2 Maria Jose Vargas Parada dominated this season, making 6 of 8 pro finals and downing Paola Longoria in Virginia for her 5th career LPRT title. She holds a significant lead now over #3 Salas heading into next season.

– #3 Samantha Salas Solis had an inconsistent season, making just one pro final on the season after making the final 9 times in 9 tries last season. She still holds a significant points advantage over #4 though, but has to be facing some questions in this off-season as to why her season went off the rails and what she can do to get it back on track.

– Alexandra Herrera holds steady at #4 for the third straight season. She made 4 semis, 2 quarters and missed 2 events in the 8-event season.

– #5 Natalia Mendez improved her year end standing for the fourth straight season, just barely pipping #6 Rajsich for the 5th spot on tour. She made two semis on the season.

– #6 Rhonda Rajsich finishes off her 20th straight season on tour ranked in the top 6 or better. She had an up and down season, getting upset in the 16s four times, but also making two semis. She seemed to improve as the season went on.

– #7 Montse Mejia finishes 7th on tour despite only playing half the events, and she made statements whenever she did play. This is her first career pro top-10 finish. In each of her four appearances, she exited at the hands of #1 Longoria and has a slew of wins over top 8 players. She actually led #6 Rajsich in season-to-date points and will likely jump up quickly next season. It is relatively safe to say that if Mejia played the tour full time, she’d be pushing for #2 just behind Longoria.

– #8 Nancy Enriquez held onto the #7 seed for most of the season, getting knocked out of it thanks to two late-season round-of-16 upsets to finish ranked 8th.

– #9 Amaya Cris survives a mid-season injury without too much rankings damage thanks to the abrupt end of the season, but she loses her long-held foothold on the #8 spot for the time-being and would face a tough opponent in Enriquez in the 16s just to face Longoria. Its hard to get out of the 8/9 spot.

– #10 Masiel Rivera Oporto takes the 10th spot by the skin of her teeth, pipping #11 Parrilla by just four points. This is Rivera’s first career top 10 finish.

——–

#11 Jessica Parrilla just missed out on a return to the top 10, but she had a great 2nd half of the season to build upon in her attempt to regain her former lofty ranking. She also made up some of the most ground on tour rankings wise, finishing last year ranked 37th after missing most of the season with a serious knee injury.

A side note here; the difference in points from #12 to #15 is just 33 points this season; that’s basically one additional quarter final appearance. One result can vault these players up the rankings significantly.

#12 Carla Muñoz Montesinos also made a great jump this season after finishing #20 last year. She had a couple of solid wins this year over top-8 players and should push for a top 10 spot next year.

#13 Brenda Laime Jalil repeats at #13 from last year’s season ending rankings. She made two quarters on the season and proved to be a tricky opponent all year.

#14 Ana Laura Flores also repeats at #14; she had a couple of solid wins on the year after blowing through Mexican 18U last summer.

#15 veteran Adriana Riveros takes a step back from touring and falls from #10 to #15 this season.

#16 Sheryl Lotts played top 10 pros tough all season, was seeded as high as #10 at one point but settles in at #16 on the season.

#17 Erin Nocam had a couple of solid wins and made a pro quarter this year, improving to #17 for the season.

#18 Maria Renee Rodríguez grinded (ground?) her way through the season to improve from last year’s #23 finish.

#19 Cassandra Lee played 6 of the 8 events on the season and played top-8 seeds tough all year. She falls slightly from last year’s #15 finish.

#20 Bolivian turned Argentine Valeria Centellas only played 4 events but made a quarter and a semi. She had wins over four of the current top 10 players on tour as well as the reigning US national champ. She’s also got one more year in juniors, which should send shudders down the spines of ladies pro players as she gains confidence and power.

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Notables in the 20-30 range:

#21 Adrienne Fisher Haynes finishes ranked on tour for the 21st straight season. The tour veteran got a solid win at the US Open and played top 8 players tough all season.

#22 Kelani Lawrence played 6 of the 8 events on tour this season and made a quarter-final after a solid win over Enriquez in Florida. The reigning US National champ seems poised to make a run up the rankings.

#23 Susy Acosta Racquetball finishes her 23rd season on tour.

#24 Frederique Lambert falls from 9th last season and 2nd the season before now that she’s a practicing medical doctor. The tour misses having such a talent involved on a regular basis.

#25 Hollie Scott continues to tour part time while in college and is a dangerous player when she does play.

#27 Ana Gabriela Martínez came out of “retirement” to play a few events, but falls precipitously from last year’s #11 spot. I’m hoping she returns to full time touring when her school commitments allow and competes for a top 10 spot.

—————
Other Notables the rest of the way

#35 Cheryl Gudinas earns ranking points in her 27th straight season, every season since 1993-4.

#33 Graciana Wargo was a pro debutant this season, as was #37 Megan Shelton, #46 Kathy Nells, #54 Ayoko Hanashi and #54 Annie Roberts . Wargo and Roberts are US junior national team members who played pro events for the first time this season.

—————
What’s next for the LPRT?

The team is working on rescheduling the TeamRoot.com classic to be the opener for the new season. No word yet on when that might happen. But the next time the ladies take the court it will be to start the 2020-21 season.

—————
Tags

International Racquetball Tour
LPRT
International Racquetball Federation – IRF
Pan American Racquetball Confederation – PARC
UnitedHealthcare US OPEN Racquetball Championships
USA Racquetball
Racquetball Canada
Federación Mexicana de Raquetbol
Federación Boliviana De Raquetbol – Febora
Federación Boliviana de Racquetball
Racquetball Colombia
Federacion Colombiana de Racquetball
Asociación Argentina de Racquetball
Federación Chilena Racquetball
Racquetball Rancagua, Chile
Jugadores Racquetbol Guatemala
Ferac Racquet
Reaching Your Dream Foundation

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Longest running Racquetball Tournaments

A couple months back, you know when we still had racquetball tournaments to discuss, I saw some discussion debating what is the longest running tournament in the sport.

I tried to compile some of the alternatives/candidates, but i figure the hive-break

Here’s some candidates:

National/International events

(Note: i use the future tense here in all cases, knowing that a lot of these have been cancelled. I’m hopeful maybe some will still be held.)

– 2020 will be the 53rd US Amateur National Singles, running continuously since 1968.
– 2020 will also be the 53rd US Amateur National Doubles tournament (though I believe the first couple iterations were held at the same event as singles).
– 2020 will be the 47th US Junior Nationals event.
– 2020 will be the 47th WOR 3-wall Outdoor Nationals in Southern California.
– 2020 will be the 46th Canada Amateur Nationals
– 2020 will be the 33rd Pan American Racquetball Championships, initially called the “Tournament of the Americas” and held nearly every year since 1986 at various spots around the North and South American continents.

I honestly don’t know how far back Mexican Nationals goes.

————–
What about known state organizations?
– Jan 2020 was the 51st Florida State Singles tournament: https://www.r2sports.com/tourney/home.asp?TID=30962 . They’ve been going every year since 1970.

Are there any other states that go back this far? In the early days Rball was biggest in places like Missouri, Wisconsin, California; wondering if there’s this long a history in some of these early hotbeds of the sport.

————–
What about Pro events?

Here’s the longest current streaks of active pro events at the tier 1 level. This means, year over year this event hasn’t missed a year in being a top-tier sponsored event.

– 2020 US Open will be the 25th straight iteration of the sport’s marquee event, starting in 1996 in Memphis and moving to Minneapolis in 2010.

On the IRT side:
– The 2020 Florida Pro/Am will be the 13th straight year it has served as an IRT Tier 1 event.
– The Lewis Drug has been an IRT Tier 1 event now 7 years running.
– The Pelham Memorial/Tournament of Champions event in Portland has also been an IRT Tier 1 event now 7 years running.

The Lewis Drug Pro/Am is billed as the “Longest running Men’s Pro tournament,” in its 42nd year. Our site only tracks tier 1 events, and the Lewis Drug event hasn’t been a tier 1 for 42 straight years, but reportedly has been at least a satellite event all that time.

On the LPRT side:
– The Christmas Classic in the DC area (first in Arlington, VA, now in Laurel, MD) has been an LPRT event 12 years running.
– the Battle at the Alamo in San Antonio in April will be the 8th straight year
– the Paola Longoria Experience in San Luis Potosi has been running 6 straight years through 2019.

————–
How about long-running non-state/national events in general? some of these may have had pro events attached to them now or in the past, but here’s some candidates that have been mentioned:

– Northwest Open, Bellingham WA: 49th annual in 2020
– Tornado Alley Classic in Wichita Falls, TX: 46th year in 2020; claims to be the longest volunteer run sanctioned event in the US.
– Keystone Classic in Winnipeg, Manitoba; 46th Annual in 2020 as well.

Other long running events that I’ve seen:
– Shamrock Shootout in Chicago, IL: 35th annual in 2020
– Garden City Shootout in Garden City, KS: 30th in 2020
– Christmas Classic in Washington, DC area: 29th in 2020.
– Wintergreen in Laurel, MD: ?? but running since 1980s. Anyone from The Peak Racquetball have any idea?

Feel free to pipe up with other suggestions; any event that’s been running 30+ years I’d like to hear about.

———–
Happy quarantine Monday!

International Racquetball Tour
LPRT
International Racquetball Federation – IRF
Pan American Racquetball Confederation – PARC
USA Racquetball
Federación Mexicana de Raquetbol
Racquetball Canada

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Gregg Peck: 9/28/63 – 5/4/20

Gregg Peck upon winning the 1985 DP/leach Natioanls. Photo via National Racquetball

Today we were shocked to hear of Gregg Peck’s passing. It was just last week when he joined the International Racquetball Tour‘s broadcast to offer up some stories and opinions, and it was just a few months ago when he fulfilled a life-long goal of being given the sport’s highest honor by being named to the USA Racquetball Hall of Fame.

I was shocked to hear of his passing. The last time we were talking about Gregg in this space was to laud his career accomplishments in support of his candidacy. We spoke last week. And suddenly he’s gone.

It seems small to talk about someone’s “on the field” legacy when they pass: after all Gregg stopped playing professionally more than 30 years ago. He had a long career as a sales executive, was married for more than 27 years to wife Lauren and had two college-aged daughters. He was a great guy who loved to talk shop about the sport he grew up playing and loving, and i know for a fact that he would have been crushed to have missed his opportunity to take a picture on the USAR dais receiving the same career accomplishment award has his older brother Dave Peck received.

here is a link to his playing career retrospective, in case you’re reading this and don’t know who he is or what he accomplished: http://blog.proracquetballstats.com/…/gregg-peck-career-re…/

Lastly i’ve attached every picture Gregg could find from his press coverage of his career here. Most of these are from 1984-1985 time frame.

God Bless the Peck family and my thoughts are with you all.

Posted on

New Reports at Pro Racquetball Stats (part 3)

Part 3 of 3 posts going over the content we’ve added recently.

– Big news: we’ve started to add Amateur National Qualifiers to the Amateur database! We had to modify some queries and add others. We also have put in a number of additional Categories for searching. We’re still back-filling in lots of Canadian Qualifiers, but as of this writing…
o all USA doubles qualifiers from 2016-2020 are in
o All Canadian qualifiers from Nov 2017-present
o A bunch more Canadian qualifier events are in the staging xls, but not yet loaded.

Some new example queries:
– http://rball.pro/1BEF9F is Q/S/F for USA National Doubles qualifiers from 2016-2020.

– http://rball.pro/0AAA0E is the finals of the last few Canadian Men’s Open qualifier events, the last 6 of which was won by Samuel Murray

I have a ton more to go; two qualifiers a year in Canada going back more than a decade is a lot of events to transcribe. I’ll probably send out a different email upon final data catch-up.

– I’ve also been adding other country data besides the “big 3” of USA, Canada, Mexico in an attempt to widen the scope of the data. This spring we’ve captured Qualifiers and/or Nationals results from Bolivia, Ecuador and India. I’m having some issues getting the full results for these events (India used R2 Sports App but the other countries did not), but the goal is to start loading in more data. I’ve also reached out recently to countries like Chile and Mexico with the hope of building out historical results.

A call to the community: ANYONE with links to national organizations in other countries who may be able to provide data is welcomed. There’s a dozen other countries out there that run national events that I’d love to have in the database.

– I’ve started to work on a change_nationality() function that properly shows all countries of origin properly for players who have switched allegiances in their career. The most recent example is of course Alex Landa switching from Mexico to USA, so the function should properly show Landa being “from” the USA in tourneys after Nov 2019 and being “from” Mexico before that. There’s now many players who have switched and as we see reports that need more coding we fix them.

– fixed bug in player_history_alltours() to get Event links to properly render based on alternate tour variable. This is a common issue in the code actually, since we over load lots of variables to support all sorts of different use cases in the code.

– fixed a bug in the Draw Size queries that was improperly counting draw sizes for events that depended on round robins. I was counting total matches, not distinct losers. I also was mis-couting events that have 3rd place games.

– the most recent addition: A Year-End Rankings Matrix tracking the current pro players and their year over year season ending ranking in one place. http://rball.pro/8D2F5F

———————
Other general improvements
– I’ve begun adding direct links in some places to specific tournaments, so that if you’ve run (for example) All Finals for a season you can click on the tournament name to get immediately to the “All Matches per Event” report.

– We’ve added some additional fields to the Tale of the Tape reports for players as we can find it; we’re always looking for more and better data.

– We’ve added “As of Date” date logic printing to every report; we list the day the report was run as well as the date of the latest tournament in the database. We did this to help support the IRT’s broadcast team so that they know when the data they’re looking at (if its been printed) is as of for context.

– We have created a number of reports to help the Reaching Your Dream Foundation organization report on its sponsored players; these are only available via private links shared only with RYDF staff, but also are something we can support for other tours or other organizations as needed. I’ve also created custom jump pages for the IRT broadcasters for example, and can do other one-offs as needed.

– We’ve modified the code to handle the LPRT’s conversion to best-of-3 scoring in Aug 2019.

– Thanks to an observation from Jon Rafkind, we had some redirect and coding bugs preventing the website from using SSL properly. So now you should see all pages on the site loading via https:// … if not, you may have the non secure link cached in your browser.

– Fixed some code typos as noticed by Tj Baumbaugh where my footer links on the home page/choose_tour.pl page were going to the wrong link for the LPRT.

– We’ve added a third Player Pull-down for all players who have appeared in the current season to help navigate players more easily. Some people have asked how the “Historical tour player” is populated; its driven by 50 tour wins. Well, there’s players in the current top 10 who don’t have that many wins, so they’re not in the “Historical” or “Frequent tour players” list … instead of changing that number, i just added a third pull-down.

– Photo Attribution: I modified the player_profile table to hold Photographer credits for all player profile pictures used, and then modified the code to read in a JS library (label.css) to put in a photo caption and give photographer credit where its due. I’ve also started cleaning out photo usage to try to migrate all photo usage to use materials from photographers that I’ve got “agreements” with. Many of the photos in there right now are from Kevin Savory or Ken Fife, who have been doing a lot of the photography at local pro events the last couple of seasons. But I hope to incorporate more photos from other photographers later on.

——————-
Tags

International Racquetball Tour
LPRT
International Racquetball Federation – IRF
USA Racquetball
Racquetball Canada
Federación Mexicana de Raquetbol
Federación Boliviana De Raquetbol – Febora
Federación Boliviana de Racquetball
Federación Chilena Racquetball
Racquetball Rancagua, Chile
Ferac Racquet
Federación Ecuatoriana de Racquetball – FERAC
India racquetball

Posted on

New reports at ProRacquetballStats.com! (Part 2)

Here’s some more reports we’ve added lately. There will be a part 3 of this post: we’ve added a lotta a stuff in the last year or so.

—————–

– I added a couple of specific IRF queries around the time of the Pan Am games in Aug 2019 that i’ll cover in a separate post, probably revisiting the next time we actually have an IRF event (they have cancelled the Pan American Racquetball Confederation – PARC championships for 2020 thanks to Covid-19). But if you’re bored you can fire up the IRF section and run all sorts of new reports.

– In support of the UnitedHealthcare US OPEN Racquetball Championships last October, we created two new US Open specific reports:
o Player W/L Record just at US Opens: this was suggested by Dean DeAngelo Baer to help highlight just US Open performance and it has shown some amazing stats. Here’s Kane Waselenchuk’s US Open W/L record report: http://rball.pro/ABF04B (he’s 90-3 lifetime at the sport’s biggest event)
o Player Match History just at US Opens: a full list of all US Open matches per player. Here’s Conrrado kevin Moscoso Ortiz Racquetball‘s match history: http://rball.pro/2F8B8C

– Player Lefty-Righty W/L Splits: great suggestion from Brian Pineda (who still owes me $10 from a bet made during a match last fall), who surmised that some players are better than others against lefties. Well, now you can query that. Here’s Alex Landa ‘s splits L vs R: http://rball.pro/28335A

– Head to Head Summary report: interesting suggestion by Timothy Baghurst to emulate a graphic we saw posted on a Squash broadcast: if you fire up the “Tale of the Tape” report, you can now select this H2H Match Summary report, which breaks down the h2h wins/losses, plus gives details on 3-game wins, 4-game wins and 5-game wins in both the best-of-3 and best-of-5 format. Here’s an example of this data for matches between Kane Waselenchuk and Rocky Carson: http://rball.pro/49B9BA

– Slight improvement to the Player Summary report as suggested by Evan Pritchard (aka Kramer X, aka the guy who writes The Racquetball Blog) to add in # of tournaments played along side # missed and total per player, per year. This does make the report more readable definitely. Here’s an example of a player summary for Paola Longoria showing the new column: http://rball.pro/7F61BB

– Addition of Player Home pages as suggested by JT R Ball. We don’t know too many stand alone pages for players, so I’ve added in some known “Facebook home pages” that some players are using in lieu of an external page. This data is now seen on the Player Profile reports. I’ll continue to add home pages as I encounter them. JT also just sent me some youtube playlist links that I may use instead of home pages for some players.

– Added functionality to the “Oldest to…” and “Youngest to…” reports after a conversation where Keerti Kumar asked whether Lalo Portillo99 was the youngest player ever to break into the top 10. I’ve modified the “Youngest to..” and “Oldest to…” queries to also list the Youngest and Oldest players to ever finish a season ranked in the top 10 on tour.

Here’s the report
http://rball.pro/1DE1E5

The answer to the question, “was Lalo the youngest ever to break into the top 10?” requires a bit of a history lesson.

Short Answer: No.

Longer Answer: Prior to 1982 there wasn’t a points system on tour used to determine the year end winner; the year end Nationals tournament determined the winner. They did have a ranking system, but it was just used to seed events properly. In the early days of racquetball, the tour was dominated by very young players succeeding at an early age. Marty Hogan (racquetball) for example finished as runner up in the Nationals in 1976 and 1977 at the ages of 18 and 19 respectively. Brett Harnett amazingly played most of the 1980-1 season at the age of 16, then made the semis of Nationals just after turning 17. Newly elected Hall of Famer Gregg Peck was just a few months younger than Harnett and played alongside of him, making the quarters of the 1981 nationals also at the age of 17.

Harnett then finished ranked 4th on tour the first year there was a ranking system in 1982. Other teenagers to finish in the top 10 once there was a ranking system include Gregg Peck, Gerry Price in 1983, Cliff Swain in 1985, Jack Huczek in 2002 and most recently Daniel De La Rosa in 2013.

– Added a section to the “Oldest to..” report to have a “non Ruben Gonzalez version of the “Oldest players to make the round of 16” on the Men’s tour. Ruben held 19 of the top 20 spots; now you can see who else is getting close.

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We’ll do part 3 next week to spread out the rball content!

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tags:

International Racquetball Tour
LPRT
International Racquetball Federation – IRF
USA Racquetball
Racquetball Canada
Federación Mexicana de Raquetbol

Posted on

New reports at ProRacquetballStats.com! (Part 1)

Since we don’t have any tourneys to talk about … and may not for some time, I thought i’d fill the time describing some of the additions we’ve made over the past few months. I’ll do this post in a few parts, since we’ve added a ton of stuff in the year since I last did one of these posts.

We’re always trying to add new stuff to the Pro Racquetball Website; if you ever have a suggestion, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll see about putting it in!

Here’s some of the new reports and functionality that we’ve added;

– Career Best Ranking and Career Best Seeding: we previously had a Career Best Showing report for players: now we added two more to show the highest tournament seed a player has achieved along with their highest career ending ranking. See these two examples for Andree Parrilla: http://rball.pro/B43B09 and http://rball.pro/8A65E8 .

– Individual Player Profiles: basically the same data we show in the Tale of the Tape reports … just for a specified player. Here’s Cliff Swain‘s Player Profile report: http://rball.pro/603ED7

– Misc Match Stats: with the conversion to best-of-3 format in both pro tours, we have done some work on the Misc tour Stats reports to highlight some of the information there. In this report you can find out, for example, the percentage of 3 game matches won by the player who lost the first game, or how many 5-game matches we have on record.

Here’s the report for the LPRT: http://rball.pro/B28CD6 . We know this report needs a bunch more work to really be a statistically relevant post suitable for research; the logic is a bit tricky and needs time.

– Most Matches, Most Wins, Most Losses: put in several additional counting reports to show some interesting stats. Here’s the link to “Most Matches” on tour: http://rball.pro/D74465 . Not Surprisingly, Swain leads the way by a significant margin for the Men’s pros historically.

– Added more Junior categories for some countries (like Canada) for more reporting options. So now you can run reports like, “Show me all the Canadian Junior Girls 18U finals” and get breakdowns like that (that report btw is here: http://rball.pro/3EEA3E)

– Adding WOR categories to singles reporting so you can get just One-Wall results, or just Huntington Beach outdoor National Female champs for all of history, etc.

– Plus, Thanks to a ton of research by Brett Elkins we have a lot more detail on the Men’s outdoor champs. Here’s all Men’s outdoor national champs plus in many cases the semifinalists and finalists to 1974: http://rball.pro/3C386C . We also now have, for the first time, Women’s champs as well.

– Created Player Profiles per Season report: this lists all the player profile data for all players who appear in a particular season. Here it is for the IRT for last season: http://rball.pro/B47A74

You can now run player profiles at multiple grains of data:
– Per individual
– Per event
– Per Season
– For all regular players on tour
– For all players in the database (nearly 1,800 players now!)

– Created a “Worst player W/L record” report … i won’t put in the link to protect the innocent, but its an enlightening report 🙂 .

– We created “All Matches per Season” so that you can see, as it sounds, a list of all the hundreds of matches that occur in a particular season. I ended up commenting it out b/c it was just too much data to present nicely. But if someone really wants it I can make it available.

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We’ll do another post with some more updates next week to help pass the time and create some racquetball content

tags

International Racquetball Tour
LPRT
International Racquetball Federation – IRF
USA Racquetball
Racquetball Canada
Federación Mexicana de Raquetbol
WOR – World Outdoor Racquetball

Posted on

IRT Shamrock Shootout Wrap-Up

Kane wins again. Photo US Open 2019, Photographer Kevin Savory

Congrats to your winners on the weekend:
– Singles: Kane Waselenchuk
– Doubles; Daniel De La Rosa/Alvaro Beltran

R2 Sports App home page for event: https://www.r2sports.com/portfolio/r2-event.asp?TID=31369

——————

Lets review the notable matches in the Singles draw.

Singles Match report in the PRS database: http://rball.pro/2D58FF

—————-
In the 128s: no surprises. Local @Victor Migliore took Guatemalan veteran Christian Wer to a tie-breaker but fell 11-9. The other three traveling members of the Guatemala national team all won their openers and moved on. Oregon’s Jim Douglas, an active member of the online rball community, went down in a tie-breaker to local player Nadeem Sharifudden.

In the 64s, a couple of notable matches:
– Guatemalan Juan Salvatierra downed IRT touring regular Justus Benson in two close games 12,13. Solid win by Salvatierra to move on.
– Semi-regular IRT regular Kyle Ulliman was stretched by another traveling Guatemalan in Edwin Galicia before advancing in a breaker.

—————-
In the 32s, we got some upsets and close matches.
– In the 16/17 match, a tiebreaker as expected. #16 Sebastian ‘Patata’ Fernandez held off the Costa Rican number one Andres Acuña 11-7 in the breaker.
– Jaime Martell Racquetball showed he came to play, crushing the #9 seed Mario Mercado 7,2 to make the main draw as a #24 seed.
– #13 Thomas Carter crushed the upstart #20 Sam Bredenbeck 1,9 to make the main draw.
– #19 Robert Collins pushed #14 Eduardo Garay Rodriguez to a breaker before falling.
– In the 15/18 match, a surprise. #18 Adam Manilla outplayed and outhustled #15 Javier Mar to advance 9,9. Mar was off, but Manilla was definitely on. can he make another run (he made the Semis in Austin in January?

—————-
In the 16s:
– #1 Kane Waselenchuk got his tourney started off against the upstart youngster #16 Sebastian Fernandez, who lost 6,9. Good showing here against the king.
– #8 Lalo Portillo99 got a very solid win against #24 Martell 13,13 to move on. Martell pushed but couldn’t break through here, though there wasn’t much between these players on the day.
– #5 Andree Parrilla reversed his recent one-and-done trend with am emphatic win over #12 Gerardo Franco Gonzalez 0,11.
– #4 Alvaro Beltran held serve against #13 Carter 8,8 to move on.
– #3 Rocky Carson was stretched to a tiebreaker by #14 Garay before advancing 11-7.
– #6 Daniel De La Rosa went to the limit against #11 Jake Bredenbeck, saving match point against to win 11-10.
– #7 Samuel Murray dominated #10 Rodrigo Montoya Solís 11,3 to get another quarter final appearance and put some distance between him and Rodrigo in the race for the top 10. Montoya, who had been as high as #8 this season, will dip down to #12 with these results, and he has to be thinking about what he can do to turn things around.
– #2 Alex Landa advanced by the skin of his teeth, beating upstart lefty #18 Manilla 11-10.

So, the quarters are chalk, with the top 8 seeds advancing, but it could have gone either way with a number of these matches.

—————-
In the Quarters

– #1 Kane held serve against #8 Portillo, advancing to the semis 6,7.
– #5 Parrilla continued his best pro showing in months, coming from a game down to take out veteran Beltran in a breaker.
– #6 DLR crushed #3 Carson 5,5. This is Rocky’s 5th exit this season at the quarters or earlier … last season he made the semis or better in every event. Meanwhile DLR continues his resugence; these results will be enough for him to supplant Moscoso for #6 on tour, and within shouting distance of #5 and #4.
– #2 Landa cruised by his doubles partner #7 Murray in two shorter games.

—————
In the Semis
– #1 Kane showed how formidable he can be, coming down from a large game two deficit to cruise into the final 6,11 past #5 Parrilla. With this semis appearance, Parrilla nearly catches back up with Beltran for 4th on tour; its going to be a great battle for that 4/5 spot the rest of the way.
– #2 Landa ended the DLR freight train but needed a tiebreaker to do so. Landa extends his recent dominance over DLR (he’s won their last 7 meetings).

In the Finals, it was one-way traffic like it often is with Kane, who took about 10 minutes to take the first game 15-3 and eventually the match 3,5.

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Points Implications of results; This tourney replaces the same event last season, so there’s some players defending higher than average points. In Chicago last season, Kane d Rocky in the final and Andree/Montoya made the semis. Also notably, DLR got upset in the 16s, so he had great gains here this weekend.

Notable ranking moves:
– DLR overtakes Moscoso for #6
– Bredenbeck should jump to #10; he was #13 entering the event. Jake and Mercado are now separated by just 2 points in my worksheet for the #10 spot, which would be the first time Jake finishes in the top 10 if he can retain the spot.
– Horn’s injury-driven absence costs him 3 spots in the rankings; he falls to #18 from #15 last week.
– Sam Bredenbeck jumps back into the top 30; he is now #28.
– Jaime Martell makes a huge jump from #42 to #35

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Doubles review

Match report in the PRS database: http://rball.pro/B01855

Chalk to the quarters, though both the #1 and #2 seeds went tiebreaker to get there.

In the semis, the top to Mexican teams advanced yet again to the final to face off. #1 DLR/Beltran dropped a game to the quickly improving Portillo/Parrilla pairing before moving, while Montoya/Mar dominated the #2 seeds Landa/Murray 11,3 to force a rematch of the Mexican Nationals event that happened just a few weeks ago.

In the final, DLR/Beltran got back the upper hand in their burgeoning rivalry with their younger Mexican teammates, taking a closely fought 10,13 match for the title. Its their 7th pro doubles title together since Jan 2017.

—————-
Other Draws:

Men’s Open went nearly chalk into the quarters, and chalk to the semis with the top 4 seeds (all IRT regulars) advancing.

In one semi Fernandez topped Franco in two, while in the other Acuna spanked Mercado to make the final. There, both guyts played like they had a plane to catch (both are very fast workers), and Acuna took out his Mexican rival 11,13.

Women’s Open; a decent 8-woman draw was taken by Erika Manilla, who beat top junior Erin Slutzky in the semis and then Costa Rican international Melania Sauma in the final.

Men’s Open Doubles was taken by Cuevas/Franco over top seed Illinois locals Keith Minor and Fernando Javier Rivera.

Mixed Open Doubles was taken by Slutzky and India international Alok Mehta.

—————–
Thanks for all the streaming on the weekend, especially from broadcasters Dean Baer, Favio Soto, Pablo Fajre and the IRTLive crew

——————
Next up?

Well. I have no idea what is next.

Its pretty amazing what has transpired in this country in just the last 7 days. A week ago we were finishing up the Boston Open on the Ladies side without any real national movement on this Covid-19 Corona Virus. Then in the last week, from a rball perspective we’ve seen every major tournament planned for the next month cancelled. WOR Beach Bash, a number of state singles competitions, an IRT tier 5 in Monroe, LA, USAR intercollegiates, and most notably the annual PARC event to be held in Bolivia.

That clears out the racquetball schedule through at least mid April. But who knows what will transpire between now and then. We’re already seeing travel bans; it seems unlikely that a “tour” based sport like pro racquetball could function if none of the traveling players could travel to the events.

So who knows. Is it possible we’ve seen the last pro events until well into the summer? Maybe. Depends on how dangerous this virus turns out to be, how exponentially it expands, and how much more of an impact it makes on society. Crazy times.

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tags

International Racquetball Tour
LPRT
International Racquetball Federation – IRF
USA Racquetball
Racquetball Canada
Federación Mexicana de Raquetbol
Federación Boliviana de Futbol
Racquetball Colombia
Federacion Colombiana de Racquetball
Federación Costarricense de Racquetball
Jugadores Racquetbol Guatemala

Posted on

IRT Shamrock Shootout Preview

Rare appearance on tour from Mexican Jaime Martell. Photo via US Open 2019, Photographer Kevin Savory

The full Mens tour is back in action for the 35th Annual KWM Gutterman, Inc. Shamrock Shootout Tier 1 Pro Stop Presented by MyPillow, being held in Lombard, just outside of Chicago IL.

The 35th annual running event, which makes it one of the longer running events in the land. It has been a full tier 1 stop for the past 5 years. Chicago itself has been a regular home to IRT stops in general, for years hosting Pro Nationals, and then for years before that the famous Halloween Open. A lot of this was due to former tour commissioner and long time rball organizer Dave Negrete being Chicago-based.

R2 Sports App link: https://www.r2sports.com/website/event-website.asp?TID=31369

This year, we’ve got a large draw: 39 players entered.

top20 players missing: Bolivians #6 Conrrado kevin Moscoso Ortiz Racquetball and #14 Carlos Keller Vargas are both absent, probably saving travel dollars for next month’s Pan American Racquetball Confederation – PARC event. Moscoso’s absence elevates #9 Portillo into a top 8 seed here. #12 Sebastian Franco is missing; the 4th event this season he’s missed. #15 David Horn picked up what he described as a “bad injury” last weekend in Pueblo and is out. The rest of the top 20 is present plus a good chunk of the guys ranked 21-30 so this is a great draw.

is it a flip draw? Nope, this is a straight draw 1-8.

——————————
Lets preview the draw. Here’s some notable qualifying matches that i’m looking forward to:

In the round of 128:
– Thanks to the proximity of the upcoming Pan American Racquetball Championships, we’ve got the full Guatemalan team here (Edwin Galicia, Javier Martinez, Juan Salvatierra and Christian Wer). Each of these four is playing a local IRT debutant in the opening round of 128, so welcome all first time pro players.

———————————-
In the round of 64: things start to heat up.
– #17 Andres Acuña manages to be the highest player not getting a bye into the 32s; for his trouble he likely gets a juicy central american match-up against Guatemalan Martinez.
– #24 Jaime Martell Racquetball vs #25 Anthony Martin; great opener, as we would expect from a 24/25 match-up. Martel makes a rare appearance on tour, while Martin plays his 6th event of the season.
– #19 Robert Collins likely takes on Guatemalan veteran Christian Wer.
– #26 Guatemalan Edwin Galicia likely takes on #23 Kyle Ulliman in what could be a close match.

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Projecting the 32s: here’s some possible match-ups, though the depth of this draw could make for some upsets and make these predictions moot:
– #16/#17 looks like a potential doozy: #16 Sebastian ‘Patata’ Fernandez, who has been stuck at the #17 seed the last couple of tournaments, jumps a spot and thus gets the bye into the 32s. He’ll likely face #17 Acuna, who has been getting solid wins all season. Tough one to predict: I like Patata to build on his Mexican Nationals showing and move on.
– #9 Mario Mercado versus likely #24 Martell: Rough possible draw for Mercado, who has faced Martell a few times before and never beaten him. I like a run for the Mexican here.
– #13 Thomas Carter versus likely #20 Sam Bredenbeck; fun match here between two of the younger guys on tour. Sam beat Carter in 2019 Sioux Falls but it was tight.
– #11 Jake Bredenbeck vs likely #22 Justus Benson: lots of broken balls in this one; two hard hitters.
– #15 Javier Mar versus likely #18 Adam Manilla: this is the highest i can recall seeing Mar seeded in an event; he’ll fancy his chances to move on and face a familiar opponent in the 16s.

——————————-
round of 16:
– #1 Kane Waselenchuk versus the Fernandez/Acuna winner; neither will be favored to beat the King of course, but I like what i’ve seen lately out of Fernandez and i’d like to see what his confident game style brings against Kane.
– #24 Martell vs #9 Lalo Portillo: this is a stretch, but if Martell pulls off the upset of Mercado he could very well also upset Portillo. They faced off in 2019’s Mexican Nationals, a straight forward 2-game win for Jaime. Portillo won the Minnesota event last weekend and had a very solid Mexican nationals in 2020 (topped Montoya, took DLR to a breaker). This could be a fascinating match.
– #5 Andree Parrilla vs #12 Gerardo Franco Gonzalez: Parrilla is in a rut; he’s gone one and done the last three pro events, he lost in the 16s at Mexican Nationals to a player he should have beat, and one of those pro round of 16 losses was to Franco. I sense another upset here until Andree can right the ship.
– #4 Alvaro Beltran faces the Carter/Bredenbeck winner: either way i like Beltran, though Carter did put a Loss on Alvaro in Portland in December.
– #3 Rocky Carson returns to action after a rare missed pro event in January and likely faces the tough Eduardo Garay Rodriguez in the 16s. Garay has been playing increasingly well against top opponents, while Carson topped Landa in his last on-the-court match, seemingly having fully recovered at this point from his knee issue in December.
– #6 Daniel De La Rosa vs #11 Bredenbeck: Jake has a couple of wins over DLR … but DLR has been playing some great ball lately. He advances.
– #7 Samuel Murray vs #10 Rodrigo Montoya Solís; just a couple of meetings between these two on the books; they’re 1-1 h2h. This is the kind of match Montoya needs to win in order to establish his spot in the rball elite. Both players have had kind of up and down seasons; this could be a win to build on.
– #2 Alex Landa vs #15 Mar: Neither guy here can be happy with this draw; they’re pretty evenly matched, they have split a couple of meetings at Mexican Nats over the years but have not played professionally. I think it could be tight but will favor Landa to move on.

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Projected Qtrs:
– #1 Kane over #24 Martel
– #4 Beltran over #12 Franco: they’ve played 4 times, Beltran has never dropped a game to him.
– #3 Carson vs #6 DLR: they’ve been trading wins back and forth for a few years now. DLR topped him earlier this year in Sioux Falls and has been playing really consistent ball; i’ll go with the upset here.
– #2 Landa vs #10 Montoya; when they do play, its often close: last meeting was an 11-10 win for Rodrigo in Sioux Falls in 2019. I’ll go with Landa here.

Semis:
– Kane over Beltran in what would be their 54th pro meeting.
– Landa over DLR; Landa has beaten DLR the last 6 times they’ve played and seems to have his number. But, its always close.

Finals: Kane over Landa.

——————————-
Doubles review

We’re playing pro doubles this weekend too; 10 teams with three of the best teams in the world present, plus the Bredenbeck brothers and the two national Guatemalan teams playing.

I like a rematch of the Mexican national finals to happen between #1 Beltran/DLR and #3 Montoya/Mar, but both teams will have to earn it to get t here against tough semi-finalists.

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Look for Streaming in the regular places; follow the IRT on facebook and sign up to get notifications when they go Live.
Look for Dean DeAngelo Baer, Favio Soto, Pablo Fajre and the IRTLive crew all weekend on the mike, calling the shots!

Tags

International Racquetball Tour
International Racquetball Federation – IRF
USA Racquetball
Racquetball Canada
Federación Mexicana de Raquetbol
Federación Boliviana De Raquetbol – Febora
Racquetball Colombia
Federacion Colombiana de Racquetball
Federación Costarricense de Racquetball
Jugadores Racquetbol Guatemala

Posted on

IRT Minnesota HoF and Pueblo Shootout Wrap-up

Portillo takes the Mn HoF event. Photo US Open 2019, Photographer Kevin Savory

Congrats to your winners on the weekend:

In Minnesota:
– Singles: Eduardo Portillo
– Doubles; Blake Hansen/John Goth

In Pueblo:
– Singles; Kane Waselenchuk
– Doubles; Adam Manilla/Nick Riffel

R2 Sports App home page for events:
– Minnesota: https://www.r2sports.com/website/event-website.asp?TID=31350
– Pueblo: https://www.r2sports.com/website/event-website.asp?TID=32062

A note; lower tier IRT events are not stored in the PRS database, so no PRS reporting here.

——————

Here’s a recap of the Minnesota event:

In the Quarters, the top 4 seeds (all IRT regulars) all advanced as expected. Minnesota amateur Lee Meinerz pushed #4 Justus Benson 12,13, and Iowa amateur Blake Hansen pushed #3 Sam Bredenbeck 11,9.

In the Semis, the top two seeds both advanced with relative ease. #1 Lalo Portillo99 cruised past #4 Benson 2,3 while #2 Jake Bredenbeck advanced past his brother Sam 5,8.

In the Finals, Jake took game one, but then Lalo found another gear to take the second game 15-8 and then dominated the tie-breaker to take the title (12),8,0.

In the doubles, Blake Hansen and John Goth took out two teams featuring IRT touring players to take the title, beating the Bredenbeck brothers to take a well-earned title.

—————————–
Here’s a recap of the Pueblo Event:

The 31-man draw went mostly to form to the quarters, with two minor upsets in the 8/9 and 7/10 matches by seeds. #9 Matt Melster took out #8 A.J. Fernandez to earn a shot at the King, while #10 Andrew Clarke upset #7 seeded Kerry McLain (no relation to John McLain of “Die Hard” fame apparently) to earn a shot at the #2 seeded Montoya.

In the quarters:
– #1 Kane Waselenchuk cruised past Melster 1,4
– #4 Adam Manilla cruised past his good friend and frequent doubles partner Nick Riffel 13,3.
– #6 Erik Garcia was leading in the breaker of a close match against #3 David ” Bobby” Horn] when he had to retire with an injury.
– #2 Rodrigo Montoya Solís cruised past New Mexico’s Andrew Clarke 3,6 to move on.

In the semis:
– Kane took out Manilla in a rare meeting with a fellow Lefty 7,6. Its been nearly a year since he faced a lefty on the court (April 2019 against Thomas Carter).
– Rodrigo handled Garcia 7,6 to move into the final. Both players hit with a ton of pace, but Montoya was able to manage the match to move into the final.

In the final, Kane took a friendly, entertaining shot-maker’s paradise 9,6 for the delighted crowd.

In the doubles: Manilla/Riffel took out #1 Horn/Garcia in the final after topping the Montoya-led team in the semis.

—————–
Thanks to all who did amateur broadcasting on the weekend so we could watch along. Too many to mention, but lots of fans streamed, plus the IRT setup a rudimentary streaming station in Minnesota to help out.

——————
Next up? KWM Gutterman in Chicago! Preview coming out tomorrow or the next day, as soon as the brackets are released.

——————-
tags

International Racquetball Tour
USA Racquetball
Federación Mexicana de Raquetbol