Creation/Release History of Database and Historical Information

Release 0.1: pre-release/pre-gathering: The impetus, I believe, for my starting to investigate the history of the pro tour was a Racquetball Magazine article Nov/Dec 2000, talking about a disputed 1982 tour title between Hogan and Peck. The reason this interested me was since we used Dave Peck's webhosting company www.vpwebhosting.com and I chatted with him periodically.

December 2002: Email discussions with Dave Peck about the 82 title whetted my interest even more. I discussed the matter w/ Linda Mojer, who maintained the LPRA site at the time and they had a very nice historical tournament list and historical season-ending top 10 list. I asked her why the IRT didn't have one and she answered, "well, they've asked me the same thing." So I started gathering the info.

Initially I was only getting the list of tournament winners and the season ending top 10 lists. however... it didn't turn out to be nearly as easy as I thought.

December 02: discussions at a high level with Davey Bledsoe confirmed the 77 and some of the earlier tour champions.

Feb 2003: posted on the IRT forum, which put me in touch with Scott Hirsch and Marty Hogan, discussing the early history and showing some of the controversy with the 77 and 82 seasons.

Feb 2003: Found Drew Stoddard by searching for old IRT information online, who sent me scans from a 1985 magazine plus the beginnings of the match database in the form of an excel spreadsheet containing all the Pro match results from 1973 to 1988.

Mid 2003: Began going through the IRT website, entering in the match data in the same format as Stoddard's match database. This resulted in a complete set of results frmo Aug 2000-present.

Mid 2003: Linda Mojer went through the archival of magazines at the national office and filled in the "tournament summary" spreadsheet.

Mid 2003: Began going through Curt Rettke's magazine archive and filling in the holes between 1988 and 2000. Work ceased with the end of the Killshot magazines.

Feb 2004: mySql loaded onto my ISP and I discovered how easy it is to load comma delimited data online. I quickly ran though the rest of the magazines at my disposal (Rettke's stash) filling in all tournament results printed.

Release 0.9: Mar 19th, 2004: Began programming perl queries against the 2000-present match database, doing proof of concept for the major queries. Posted on the IRT forum the QA release of the database (but no the historical information).

Mar 2004: Quickly brought online and HTML-ized all the historical information I had been maintaining, separating information into separate files. Also loaded in the 1974-1988 match data and began the arduous process of "cleansing" the data.

Release 1.0: April 6th, 2004: released full historical archive and all known pro matches.

Mid-april 2004: fixes come in from many sources.