Congrats to the 2019 Pan Am Games Team winners:
– Men: Bolivia over Colombia in the final. Mexico and USA semis
– Women: Mexico over Argentina in the final. Bolivia and USA in the semis.
Per-country notes:
– This is Bolivia’s 2nd major Men’s title, after taking the Men’s title earlier this year at the 2019 PARC.
– This is Colombia’s highest ever finish in an IRF team event, men or Women.
– This is Mexico’s 17th Women’s team title.
– This is the third time Argentina has finished as runner-up in the Women’s team division.
Team Results in the database: http://rball.pro/FEC7C5
(Note: i’ve just put all the quarter finalists as finishing in “5th” place for now; if they are eventually ranked to determin a 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th place I’ll update the data).
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And, since I never announced the fact that I did historical IRF Team results loading earlier this year. .. here’s the announcement and some context.
A few months back, Racquetball Canada reached out to PRS and IRF Media Relations guru Timothy Baghurst asking if we had Team standings from the historical International Racquetball Federation events. PRS had never pursued such data, but thought it was such a great idea that we’ve spent the past months digging up and compiling team results going back in time to the very first IRF events in the early 1980s, and the writing reports to query and display the data we found. Much was online, but much required digging into the magazine archives.
Today, i’m happy to announce the first release of this data research and inclusion to the database officially, and to note that we’ve loaded up the latest IRF events from this year, namely the 2019 Pan American Racquetball Championships and the 2019 Pan American Games events into the database.
The team queries are available in the the IRF Match database off of www.proracquetballstats.com. I put a couple of the team query examples in the Pan American wrap-up as a teaser, but here’s the official announcement with some more detail.
I’ve created several Team-based queries for your consumption:
– Per event: you can now select “Team Results” per international event to get a full list of the team standings for Men, Women and Combined Example report for the most recent 2018 Worlds: http://rball.pro/3E3571
– On the main pages for IRF Match, there’s a new section where you can select a “Team Category” and get all the historical Team winners sliced and diced any which way; All Men’s World championship winners, all Women’s Pan Am winners, all combined results across all tourneys, etc. Here’s an example of all Women Team Worlds winners from the first World’s championship in 1981 to the present: http://rball.pro/585BA0
– I’ve created some Matrix queries as well; showing all Team finishers per Event type (Worlds, PARC, etc). This is a quick way to see how countries have fared over the years. Here’s an example: this is the all-time Worlds Matrix for Men’s Teams: http://rball.pro/BD934A
– I’ve created some Country-specific queries: you can get a list of every result in the database per country. Here’s a list of all of Argentina’s team results throughout time: http://rball.pro/AE770C
– I’ve created a “Best ever finish” query too per country, since the IRF team competitions have basically been dominated by the three primary rball-playing countries. Here’s the Best ever finish in Men’s, Women’s and Combined for Bolivia: http://rball.pro/702BD2
– I’ve created counting queries: most Men’s team wins, Most Women’s and most combined. This has been divided into the various int’l categories too. For example, here’s a list of who has the most Team Combined titles at the Pan American Racquetball Championships over the past 30 years: http://rball.pro/F7D761
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As with most racquetball historical data … the early records are sometimes sparse. The magazines of the early 1980s barely covered the first IRF events, to the point where we literally don’t know who won at the first ever Pan American championships event (in 1986). I’ve had to recreate a number of Team results from scratch by literally counting up points from the event. Others i’ve kind of made assumptions of who the team winners were by looking at the four singles results (usually this was early on when the USA was winning all four competitions anyway). We’ve also had some ties in the past, which makes some of the results look odd until I figure out an elegant way to show ties in the matrixes.
I hope I havn’t made any mistakes while doing this data collection; if so please don’t hesitate to email me if you feel there’s errors.
Next steps: Regional competitions (South American Games, Bolivarian Games, etc). We will also enter the Junior team data and include the same reports for adults into the Juniors area. We also hope to get better results from country federations for older events. We’ve had some luck getting data out of the magazines of the eras, but more research there is probably needed too.
Enjoy!
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International Racquetball Federation – IRF
International Racquetball Federation
International Racquetball Federation
International Racquetball Tour
LPRT
USA Racquetball
Federación Mexicana de Raquetbol
Federación Boliviana de Racquetball