A busy month of international racquetball

A busy month of international racquetball begins Friday with the 2018 Central American and Caribbean Games that are taking place in Barranquilla, Colombia. Like the Olympics, the Central American and Caribbean Games are a quadrennial event involving countries around the Caribbean Sea. These games will be a lead up to the 2019 Pan American Games taking place in Lima, Peru.

Then next month the 19th International Racquetball Federation (IRF) World Championships will be held in San Jose, Costa Rica, August 10-18. These championships were originally to be held in Haining, China, but that fell through due to difficulties co-ordinating with the government.

Team USA

Earlier this month, USA Racquetball announced its team for the 2018 World Championships. David Horn and Charlie Pratt will play Men’s Singles with Rocky Carson and Sudsy Monchik playing Men’s Doubles. Rhonda Rajsich and Sheryl Lotts will play both Women’s Singles and Doubles. David Ellis will coach the team with Brent Huff as the trainer and Cheryl Kirk as the leader.

There are two surprising aspects the US Team. One is that Rajsich and Lotts are playing Women's Doubles, as Kelani Bailey and Sharon Jackson defeated them to win Women’s Doubles at the 2018 USA Racquetball Doubles Championships. But Bailey is getting married during the period that Worlds is occurring, so she declined the invitation to play on the team.

The other surprising aspect is that Carson isn’t playing Men’s Singles. We’re surprised by that because he is the 5 time defending World Champion in Men’s Singles. Carson hasn’t lost a singles match at Worlds since 2004 (he didn’t play singles in 2006). We expected that he’d want to try to keep that steak going. But it seems the appeal of playing doubles with Monchik was too strong, and that Carson didn’t want to play two events at Worlds.

Monchik will be playing on Team USA for just the second time. He played Men’s Doubles at the 1995 Pan American Games in Argentina, where he and Tim Sweeney won gold.

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