Estadio Español juniors earn medals at world racquetball championship

Sofía Caraves, Juan José Martínez and Nicolás Ahumada carried Estadio Español onto the podium at the Junior World Racquetball Championship in Guatemala, where the club said its young athletes left their mark with medals, effort and strong team spirit. The championship ran from December 6 to 14 at the Domo Complejo de Racquetball, giving the trio a stage built for the sport’s next generation.

That result matters because Estadio Español framed the trip as more than a single tournament finish. The club’s junior group represented both the organization and Chile on an international court, and the language around their performance pointed to discipline and competitive maturity as much as medals. For a club program, that is the clearest sign of a working pipeline: players who can handle travel, pressure and a multi-day bracket, then bring that experience back to the domestic calendar.

The broader junior world landscape reinforces why those appearances carry weight. The International Racquetball Federation bases eligibility for its 2025 World Junior Championships on age as of January 1, 2025, and staged that event from December 5 to 13, 2025, at the Club Racquetball venue in the Olympic Center Juan Pablo Duarte in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The federation thanked Dominican Racquetball Federation leaders Rafael Fernandez and Ramon Acosta, said the event had support from the Dominican Republic Ministry of Sport, Claro Dominicana, the Dominican Olympic Committee and Centro Caribe Sports, and noted that more than 30 staff members worked for over 10 days to pull it off.

That structure is what gives junior results such significance in racquetball. The sport has long relied on a relatively small group of clubs, federations and host cities to produce the next wave of elite players, and the IRF’s championship history, with recent stops in Guatemala City, Tarija, San José, San Luis Potosí, Minneapolis, Cali, Los Angeles and Santo Domingo, shows how often the junior game travels before it settles into senior ranks.

Estadio Español’s follow-up results suggest the Guatemala trip was not an isolated spike. In a later national junior event, Nicolás Ahumada won the Junior category, while Juan José Martínez and Sofía Caraves finished third. In another club junior report, Martínez won Principiantes and Ahumada took Junior A at a metropolitan tournament. Those finishes make the world championship medals look less like a standalone headline and more like the top of a deeper development ladder, one that is already producing players who can win abroad and keep winning at home.