Acuna wins Gateway City Pro/Am, upsets shake IRT finale

Andres Acuna seized the KWM Gutterman Gateway City Pro/Am in St. Louis, Missouri, beating Eduardo Portillo 15-7, 15-12 to finish the 2025-26 International Racquetball Tour season with a title that came out of a bracket full of shocks. The season-ending event delivered the volatility the tour had been building toward, and the final itself matched two players who had survived the roughest part of the draw under pressure.

The Round of 16 went according to seeding, but the quarterfinals blew the bracket apart. Eduardo Portillo stunned Kane Waselenchuk in three games, taking the breaker 11-5 and sending the year-end No. 1 seed out before the semifinals. Rodrigo Montoya stopped Jhonatan Flores, Adam Manilla earned his first career IRT win over Jake Bredenbeck, and Acuna handled Andree Parrilla, leaving the top half of the draw unsettled and the bottom half no less unstable. By the end of the round, the No. 1, No. 2, and No. 4 seeds were all gone.

Portillo kept the run going by getting past Montoya to reach his third final of the year, while Acuna beat Manilla in the semifinals to set up a title match that rewarded the player who had looked most composed when the draw started to tilt. Acuna’s 15-7, 15-12 win over Portillo gave him his second IRT title of the season and locked up the season-ending No. 3 ranking. In a finale defined by stops and starts, Acuna was the one who kept the pace on his side.

The larger picture was even more striking. Five different players won tournaments across the 2025-26 IRT season: Kane Waselenchuk, Conrrado Moscoso, Andres Acuna, Jake Bredenbeck and Jhonatan Flores. Junior national players DJ Mendoza and Cole Sendrey also appeared in the pro draw, and Mendoza needed a tiebreaker to beat his junior national doubles partner and advance, a reminder that the next wave is already pushing into the tour’s hardest rounds.

Waselenchuk still finished as year-end No. 1 for the 16th time, a run that the USA Racquetball record book traces through 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2006, 2005 and 2004, with only brief interruptions in the long span of his dominance. The St. Louis finale did not change that hierarchy, but it showed how many players are now close enough to test it.