San Antonio Worlds draw record field from 19 countries

The San Antonio World Championships ended with Team USA taking the men’s team final over Canada, 2-1, a bronze in women’s team and silver in overall combined team points. Those results sat inside a much bigger statement about where racquetball stands internationally: the XXII International Racquetball Federation World Championships drew a record 90 athletes from 19 countries and gave the sport its clearest proof that the Worlds still matter.

Held Aug. 23-31, 2024, at Thousand Oaks Family YMCA in San Antonio, Texas, the event covered men’s and women’s singles, men’s and women’s doubles, mixed doubles and team competition. The field stretched across Argentina, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Eritrea, Germany, Guatemala, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico and the United States. Brent Woody Clouse’s entry for Eritrea put Africa on the map and made the 2024 tournament the first IRF World Championships to include athletes from five continents.

That breadth is the point. Racquetball does not get many international stages that can still claim to be a real global test, but the Worlds remain one of them. With each federation allowed to enter two singles players, one doubles team and one mixed team, San Antonio rewarded countries that could field more than one or two good names. Depth mattered, because depth is what turns a medal run into a program that can survive into the next cycle.

The tournament also carried extra weight beyond medals. The IRF made San Antonio the qualification event for The World Games 2025 in Chengdu, China, which meant every match fed into seeding and national-team standing for the next international showcase. That raises the temperature on a Worlds draw in a way ordinary tour events never can.

San Antonio also fit into the broader rhythm of the sport’s calendar. The IRF has staged recent World Championships in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia, Canada, the Dominican Republic, Korea and Ireland, keeping the event on a rotating global circuit rather than pinning it to one region. The last adult World Championships in the United States before San Antonio came in 1996, which made this edition both a homecoming and a reminder that the U.S. can still anchor the sport’s biggest international stage.