Bowl­ing Sea­son Fin­ishes Strong

Bethel Uni­ver­si­ty’s new bowl­ing teams gar­nered much at­ten­tion this sea­son for their in­di­vid­ual per­for­mances. Fresh­men Ameer Lawrence and Myles Moser each won the bowl­ing pro­gram’s first in­di­vid­ual tour­na­ment wins. Fresh­man Lau­ren Jack­son fin­ished in the top 15 for an in­di­vid­ual tour­na­ment at Alma Col­lege. 

But Bowl­ing Coach Chris Adams said it took some time for the Bethel ath­letic de­part­ment to un­der­stand col­lege bowl­ing. 

“It’s in­ter­est­ing be­cause even within the ath­let­ics de­part­ment…I don’t know if there was a full un­der­stand­ing of col­le­giate bowl­ing,” Adams said. “We got col­le­giate bowlers who are on team USA from other schools.” 

While Bethel es­tab­lished the pro­gram, Adams said he is prepar­ing his ath­letes for other op­por­tu­ni­ties. In the off sea­son, bowlers can com­pete in travel teams na­tion­ally and in­ter­na­tion­ally. Adams said he en­cour­ages his ath­letes to prac­tice more and pre­pare for big­ger op­por­tu­ni­ties. 

Both Bethel men’s and wom­en’s teams prac­tice every Fri­day af­ter­noon at Park­way Lanes in Mishawaka. The weekly prac­tices pro­vide a way for Adams to teach his ath­letes the rules of the game. 

“The lane is dif­fer­ent every time they throw a ball on be­cause these balls are porous, so they pull the oil off the lanes,” Adams said. “So, every time you get back on that lane, that lanes changed, but you still have to hit that same spot down the lane.” 

Prac­tices con­sist of work­ing on tar­get­ing while tak­ing into ac­count ball speed and tim­ing. Tar­get­ing is throw­ing the ball straight down a spe­cific part of the lane. At a cer­tain point, the ball be­gins to curve to the cen­ter of the lane. 

Adams said the team works with bowlers on find­ing the right re­lease point. The bowlers can then tar­get the place they want the ball to hit the pins. Fresh­man Juan Daniel Gon­za­lez said tar­get­ing is some­thing he is get­ting used to. 

“In high school, they have this thing call ‘miss room,’ so [the oil pat­terns] can be more of a 4:1 ra­tio,” Gon­za­lez said. “So, you have four boards that are on the lane to miss. In col­lege, some of the pat­terns we bowl on are 2:1 or 1:1 so you re­ally have no miss room.” 

Some walk-on bowlers never ex­pe­ri­enced play­ing on dif­fer­ent oil pat­terns. Adams and ex­pe­ri­enced bowlers on the team showed new­com­ers how to tar­get and ad­just. 

“If a team­mate comes up to me and asks me for help, I will do what­ever it takes to help them out and get them lined up and get them track­ing again,” Lawrence said. “It’s never like, ‘No, I’m good. I’m fo­cused.’ Never. If I say that, take me out of col­lege bowl­ing be­cause I’ve lost the love of it.” 

Al­though the two teams strug­gled to com­pete well in team tour­na­ments, they de­vel­oped a team chem­istry. Moser said his friend­ships on the bowl­ing team con­tribute to their growth.  

“I think if you can…do well with your team and bounce off of each other, you can have a good time and fo­cus at the same time,” Moser said. “I think we’ve ac­com­plished that re­ally well.”