Tag: brett elkins

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WOR Historical Singles Data updated

Hawkes had 20 career Outdoor Nationals singles titles. Photo IRB cover shot

In Jan 2019, after years of research, WOR Hall of Fame chair Brett Elkins revealed a the initial results of his attempts to find all the past winners and semi-finalists of the Outdoor national championships singles events. PRS helped a little bit, finding old WOR nationals review articles in the magazines … but there’s not a ton of coverage even in the publications of the time, so kudos to Elkins for reaching out to the players from each era to test their memories on each event.

This note is to tell you that we’ve updated the PRS database to put in all the results of Elkin’s singles research so that All Finals and All Quarter/Semis/Finals reports work and display as much data as we have available. Furthermore I’ve added in some category queries so you can quickly run just the finals for Outdoor 3-wall and isolate that long-running event from the other major outdoor championships in Vegas and Florida.

Here’s some example queries for you, now live with “better” data than we had before:

All Men’s Outdoor Nats singles finals: http://rball.pro/946EC1
Current Record Holders for Outdoor Nats singles titles:
– Brian Hawkes with 20
– Rocky Carson with 12
– Several players with 2: Alvaro Beltran, Dan Southern, and Charlie Brumfield
– 8 players with 1 title each.

All Men’s Outdoor Nats Quarters/Semis/Finals: http://rball.pro/A8AE3F

Once you run the Quarters/Semis/Finals report, you can see the dilemma we face; prior to the R2 era starting in 2006, there’s almost no documented history of the event other than the stellar memory of the likes of Greg Solis, Mike Peters and others.

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The Women’s singles data isn’t as well populated: that’s one of Elkins’ todo items. We have the winners going back to 2006, nothing for most of the 1990s and 2000s, then some early history documenting the great rivalry between Lynn Adams and Martha McDonald.

All Women’s Outdoor Nats singles finals: http://rball.pro/54B622

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Of course, there’s also a separate WOR Doubles database, with Men’s, Women’s and Mixed pro doubles reports for all three major WOR events; we published a major update for the Doubles Outdoor Nationals data last week.

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Lastly a quick note that i’ve changed the “seasons” in WOR to be just the year in which the tourneys occurred, instead of assigning a “season” that crossed the Dec/Jan time-frame (which is what the pro tours do). This was an anachronism that I just never fixed, until now.

Enjoy!USA Racquetball

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Outdoor Nationals Doubles data load update

As with all other Outdoor lists, Brian Hawkes reigns supreme here too. Photo IR cover shot Aug 1984

Hello Outdoor Racquetball Fans.

I’ve recently worked with Brett Elkins, who coordinates the WOR Hall of Fame, to help populate better the Men’s historical Outdoor Nationals doubles data in the database. Brett has been working with some of the older pros to try to fill in gaps/holes in the early data to get a complete picture of past winners from the early years.

Meanwhile, I’ve gone through all available R2sports based tournaments and filled in complete draws from 2007-current. Plus, I transcribed the 2006 draw from a picture someone took of the draw-sheet (John Ellis maybe? I cannot remember where I got it from but thank you to whoever had it). This has resulted in 325 Pro doubles matches newly entered into the database.

Here’s some reports that show the newly entered data:

– http://rball.pro/3FCE81 This report shows the Quarters/Semis/Finals for all Men’s Pro Outdoor Nationals tournaments dating to 1974. It shows how we had full draw-sheets from 2019-2006, plus the 1980 tournament (courtesy of Steve Belmonte).

– http://rball.pro/B02D9AThis just shows the final and is a bit easier to read, especially on a cell phone. As you can see, there’s still a few holes: we don’t know who won at all in 1981, and we don’t know who Hawkes’ partner was for his early titles.

Based on known data, who holds the most Outdoor Nationals doubles titles?
– Brian Hawkes: 8
– Greg Solis: 6
– Craig “Clubber” Lane: 6
– Rocky Carson: 5
– Robert Hoff: 5
– Kevin Booth: 5
– Paul Olson: 4
– Mark Harding: 4
– Mike Peters: 3
– Josh Tucker: 3
– Dave Genevay: 3
– Dan Southern: 3

Fitting that the king of Outdoor holds this record to go along with his 20 Outdoor Nationals singles titles. The rest of this list is dotted with Hall of Fame outdoor players from the sport’s long history playing in Huntington Beach & Costa Mesa.

As always, if you have old drawsheets or information, please reach out so we can input it.

USA Racquetball

Hashtags #racquetball#proracquetball#outdoorracquetball#wor

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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

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Best Family Combos in Racquetball History

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).

Honorable Mentions:
– Kane Waselenchuk and Kim Waselenchuk
– Sudsy Monchik and Vero Sotomayor
– Daniel De La Rosa and Michelle De La Rosa

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.

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2. Best Brother/Sister combo: Jessica Leona Parrilla and Andree Parrilla

Honorable Mentions:
– Paola Longoria and Christian Longoria
– Coby Iwaasa and Alexis Iwaasa
– Adam Manilla and Erika Manilla

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.

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3. Best Brother/Brother: has to be the Pecks: Dave Peck and Gregg Peck

Honorable mentions:
– Jose Rojas and Marco Rojas
–  Armando Landa (or Roman) and Alex Landa
– Tim Landeryou & James Landeryou

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.

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4. Best Sister/Sister: Jacqueline Paraiso-Larsson and Joy MacKenzie

Honorable mention:
– Michelle (Key) De La Rosa & Danielle (Key) Danielle Maddux.

Am i missing any good sister acts? I could only really come up with a couple here.

From here on, its slimmer pickings…

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5. Best Father/Son: Fabian Parrilla and son Andree Parrilla

Honorable Mention:
– ?

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.

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6. Best Mother/Daughter: Malia Kamahoahoa Bailey and daughter Kelani Lawrence.

Honorable mentions:
– Gerry & Kerri Stoffregen Wachtel
– Debbie & Janel Tisinger-Ledkins

Could also include the Keys here. Karen-Darold Key entered the very first US Open ladies pro draw when her daughters were just 8 and 5.

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7. Father/Daughter: The Parrillas again: Fabian and Jessica.

Honorable Mention:
– Dennis Rajsich & Rhonda Rajsich

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.