USU racquetball club visits nat’l championships
The USU racquetball club took a trip to the Racquetball National Intercollegiate Championships hosted at Missouri State University in Springfield, Mo., last week and took 15th place overall.
Nine of USU’s 12 players placed in their respective divisions.
Club President Mike Blakesley said the racquetball club was founded four or five years ago. He said that in its first year, only one Aggie, then-club President Doug Holt, represented USU in the national tournament. Given the short history of the racquetball club at USU, Blakesley said these results were nothing short of encouraging.
“The first year he (Holt) went and played, he got slaughtered,” Blakesley said. “The next year was better, though. This is the first year he hasn’t been on the team. We kind of have to rely on traditions and the inertia of the club to carry on.”
The national racquetball tournament is bracketed out into an Olympic bracketing system by seed. The Olympic system has four sets of brackets: a gold (the highest), a blue, a red and a white bracket (the lowest). First, each team submits its roster and ranks its players from No. 1 to No. 6. The tournament then places all the one-seeds together, the two-seeds together and so forth into a large bracket, the gold bracket. All players that lose in the first round are siphoned out of the gold and moved down to the white, while the rest advance in the gold bracket. Those that lose in the second round are siphoned to a red bracket, and those that lose in the third are siphoned to the blue brackets. Those who remain undefeated through three rounds stay in the gold bracket and drop out of the tournament at the next loss.
The USU player who performed the best from among the men’s brackets was Blakesley, who took first place in the men’s No. 1 white bracket, winning the championship match in straight games, 15-2, 15-5. Behind him was Shawn Wagner who took third place in the men’s No. 2 white bracket. Scott Warner also took first in the men’s No. 6 white bracket in a very close, contested match. Warner eeked out a 21-20 victory in the do-or-die championship match of his bracket.
The Aggie women did considerably well. Every Aggie lady, save one, placed in her respective bracket, the most notable of which was Maren Wilkerson. Wilkerson advanced to the final match of the women’s No. 4 blue bracket and lost the championship match to Maddi Stevens of Utah Valley University in three games, 15-8, 5-15, 15-6. The only Aggie lady to win her bracket outright was Jennifer Goodrich, who defeated Missouri State’s Abbie Lovato in two games of the women’s No. 5 red bracket, 15-11, 15-4. The other Aggie Ladies to place were Krista Allen, who took second in the women’s No. 1 red bracket, Nicki Brinck, who took second in the women’s No. 2 white bracket, and Becky Drebin, who took second in the women’s No. 3 red bracket.
The club is now winding down its season and will prepare for next year’s activities. USU racquetball has a solid core of 16 members who gather to practice at the courts in the HPER building as often as time and schedules permit. The club also holds tryouts every year in the fall.
“At tryouts, I think we had 30 people show up,” Blakesley said. “We had to turn half of them away, which is hard. You wish you could take all of them. Really, the courts are our biggest limiting factor because we only have six courts. We can only take as many people as can play on six courts in a night. It’s hard because you can’t train as many freshmen to fill the spots of the seniors. As you lose people, you replace them, but you don’t have a lot of team building.”
One way the club builds team unity is by fundraising for itself. Money is always tight for a club that has few to no spectators, but the racquetball club gets help from the school and public.
“There’s mainly just two ways that we get money,” Blakesley said. “Since we’re one of the official clubs, we get funding from the school. So we get $1,300, which we spend pretty fast. Our entry fee for the national tournament is $1,200. We raise everything else with fundraising. We sold stuff at the basketball and football concessions, and we get a percentage from that. This year, we sold T-shirts and sweatshirts and made about $2,000 from that.”
The club has also come up with a new way to raise funds that involves the one thing everyone involved with USU racquetball loves more than anything else: playing racquetball. The club is holding a round-robin, single elimination tournament similar in format to soccer’s World Cup. This tournament is open to anyone interested in playing racquetball – student or faculty – who is also willing to pay a $10 entry fee. The tournament will take place Friday, April 23, 5 p.m. at the racquetball courts in the HPER building.
– la.hem@aggiemail.usu.edu