By: Kelly R. Diesel

Ever wondered how often two players have battled against each other? How about the size of the draw at a particular event, or how a certain athlete competes in the different cities the International Racquetball Tour (IRT) visits? Believe it or not, all of these questions and hundreds more can be answered thanks to the genius and generosity of Todd Boss.

Boss, 48-years-old from San Jose, California, currently resides in the Nation’s capital of Washington D.C. where he works as a database consultant for multiple companies and organizations. A six-year-old son, golf, baseball and pickleball take up Boss’ personal time when he’s not collecting, organizing and analyzing data.

During and after his college years, Boss began playing competitive racquetball and entered in several major tournaments. In the late 90’s/early 2000’s, Boss and his racquetball roommates discovered that a major sport that was so popular during the 70’s and 80’s didn’t have a real record of who won what tournaments. Boss immediately started contacting sources and tournaments directors and began using his career skills to build the greatest racquetball database on the Internet.

A spreadsheet of match results from the first pro racquetball tournament in 1973, all the way up until around the mid-80’s started Boss on his personal project.

“That spreadsheet was created because you had to physically flip through racquetball magazines to find head-to-head match results,” Boss said. “That spreadsheet ended in 88’ and I had to fill in the blanks from 88’ until 2002 so that it was a complete record. After the blanks were filled in, I created a website database so people would have access to these results.”

Boss’ database has progressed since the early 2000’s, from collecting the IRT men’s stats and results to adding 12 different tours and divisions (databases). In his last record count, Boss has more than 40,000 match results from more than 3,100 tournaments. But it’s not just match results, it’s everything from season-ending rankings, to career-best seedings and even “donut counters.” (Players who have given and received zero (donut) points in a match) What started as just head-to-head match results, is now a complete history guide to all stats racquetball.

Over 20 years of work has gone into Boss’ database, and he doesn’t see an endpoint.

“This is all for the love of the sport,” Boss said. “I’ve had some help and some volunteers along the way so it’s not all completely on my shoulders, but there is also no ulterior motive behind my database. The only goals I have for it (database) is to fill in the information I don’t have and to keep everything up-to-date.”

You’ll hear Boss’ stats being thrown out all over the place during an IRT broadcast, and he couldn’t be happier to hear the information being shared. For no money or demanded recognition, Boss continues to increase the size of his database to simply “fill a need.” As a huge fan of the sport and as requested by the higher powers of the IRT, Boss is determined to attend more pro stops and share more information about his racquetball database. Get lost in all the racquetball data Boss has collected at his website: http://www.proracquetballstats.com/cgi-bin/choose_tour.pl

Want More? Click HERE to read Todd’s outlook on the 2019-2020 IRT Season.