Kane Waselenchuk claims 16th IRT season-ending No. 1 title

Kane Waselenchuk finished where the math has so often left him: No. 1. His 3545 points outpaced Conrrado Moscoso’s 2989 and closed a 2025-26 IRT season that looked more open than the final ranking suggests, but still ended with the familiar name on top.

The rest of the top 10 showed both depth and movement. Andres Acuna finished third with 2280 points, followed by Jake Bredenbeck at 2126, Rodrigo Montoya at 1854, Jhonatan Flores at 1777, Eduardo Lalo Portillo at 1520, Andree Parrilla at 1500, Adam Manilla at 1479 and Javier Mar at 1469. That spread says as much about a crowded chase as it does about Kane’s ability to keep control when the bracket got messy.

The season’s most revealing matches came in the finale at the KWM Gutterman Gateway City Pro/Am in St. Louis, Missouri, at Vetta Sports, where nearly 200 participants and a packed crowd watched the year close in a city the tour says is home to the nation’s largest high school racquetball program. Eduardo Portillo’s quarterfinal win over Waselenchuk showed that the No. 1 seed was vulnerable in a single match, Adam Manilla’s first career IRT victory over Jake Bredenbeck underlined how quickly the draw could flip, and Acuna’s run through the back half of the bracket ended with the title. The tour said three of the top four seeds fell on quarterfinal Friday, the clearest sign that the finale was genuinely contested even if the season-long hierarchy held firm.

That tension defined the year. The IRT said five different players won tournaments in 2025-26, Waselenchuk, Moscoso, Acuna, Bredenbeck and Flores, which gave the standings real volatility and kept the title race alive deeper into the schedule. Moscoso missed the finale because of political issues affecting travel and competition opportunities in Bolivia, another reminder that the season’s competitive shape was not only about form, but also about who could stay in the draw.

For Waselenchuk, the finish carried the weight of history as much as this season’s points race. His IRT profile had already credited him with 128 career tournament titles and 15 year-end championships as of January 2025, and Pro Nationals in May sealed the 2025-26 crown before the last ball in St. Louis. The final table did not signal stagnation so much as a tour that pushed hard against the old order and still could not knock it down.