Bowl­ing Team Joins WHAC

MISHAWAKA—The Pi­lots’ bowl­ing team has faced sev­eral chal­lenges in kick­ing off its pro­gram. From hav­ing its in­au­gural sea­son cut short to hav­ing an un­usual off-sea­son and now hav­ing to bowl in six tour­na­ments in six week­ends, the team has had to grap­ple with one learn­ing curve af­ter an­other. This has not, how­ever, changed how Head Coach Chris Adams prepped his team for this sea­son.  

“Our sea­son got shifted around quite a bit,” said Adams. “All of our points tour­na­ments that nor­mally start in Sep­tem­ber got moved to af­ter the first of the year. So nor­mally, you are able to pick and choose from around 30 to 40 tour­na­ments, are now be­ing crammed into a 10-to-12-week pe­riod.” 

To start the year, the bowl­ing team an­nounced that they would be join­ing the Wolver­ine-Hoosier Ath­letic Con­fer­ence for the 2020-21 sea­son. Al­though they have got­ten off to a slow start as a team, they have been able to show some very im­pres­sive in­di­vid­ual per­for­mances. In their first week­end of com­pe­ti­tion, the women were able to place two bowlers in the top five in the tour­na­ment. Both Lau­ren Jack­son, who fin­ished fourth, and Erika Toops, who fin­ished fifth, showed that they were go­ing to be able to com­pete at a high level this sea­son. They backed that up with an­other strong show­ing this past week­end in Jack­son, Mich., with a pair of top-25 per­for­mances. 

“It means a lot to the girls' side,” said Adams, “They have been put in some dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tions over the last two sea­sons, so to be able to find some suc­cess has been en­cour­ag­ing. The guys have strug­gled a bit, but it's given them some­thing to gather around, and rally around one an­other.” 

The men did not place any­one in the top-25 in their first tour­na­ment of the sea­son but were able to place Dakota Saun­ders in the top-25 in the sec­ond tour­na­ment of the sea­son.  

“We are in a much harder con­fer­ence in the WHAC,” said Adams, “If we av­er­aged 200 in a tour­na­ment last sea­son, we would be plac­ing top three to four. Now in the WHAC, we bowl that and close to ten teams are do­ing that. It’s def­i­nitely been a learn­ing process for me and re­fo­cus­ing them to get bet­ter.” 

In their first three tour­na­ments of the sea­son, the men have fin­ished last in each of the first three events. The women have fin­ished eleventh in two of the three first events. 

The team will next be in ac­tion on Feb. 13 at the fourth WHAC Jam­boree in Adrian, Mich. For more in­for­ma­tion on Bethel bowl­ing visit www.bupi­lots.com.