Strike!
Allison Gerding, a junior at the University of Central Missouri, is bowling and talking about her schoolwork.
“Anybody who majors in anything but elementary education is dumb,” she tells the other women in Lane 2. “All we do is draw pictures and finger-paint.”
It’s a Tuesday afternoon, the second day of the spring semester. The 10-lane bowling alley sits at the south end of the student union. As the women on the Central Missouri bowling team prepare for practice — dressing down to shorts and T-shirts, bowling warm-up frames — their classmates stream by, carrying white plastic bags full of new textbooks.
Anyone who stops to watch sees immediately that the nine women on the lanes aren’t enrolled in beginning bowling. Their power and accuracy send pins smashing against the back wall. They look disappointed when they turn away from the foul lane with anything left standing.
“Our team has so many girls who are awesome at what they do,” says Danielle Dunkin, a sophomore who, at age 12, bowled in a scratch league at Pro Bowl Lanes in North Kansas City.
Dunkin is the lone homegrown player on the Jennies’ roster. Her teammates have come to Warrensburg from Arizona, suburban Chicago and other faraway places. Here, in this Starbucks-free college town 60 miles from Kansas City, Central Missouri’s soft-spoken coach has built a program with a national profile, one that routinely mints All-America and Team USA selections. The semester began with Central Missouri ranked fourth in the country.
Bowling is a real college sport, with polls and brackets and inscrutable eligibility rules. In 2004, the NCAA started sanctioning an official bowling championship (April Madness!). Last year’s tournament winner, Vanderbilt, went to the White House and met the president, who held a bowling ball for the photo commemorating the visit.
To get to where Vanderbilt has been, the Jennies (Central Missouri’s men’s teams are known as the Mules) bowl five or six days a week for as long as two and a half hours. The players try to sharpen skills that many of them developed as tots bowling with their parents. Growing up, Dunkin bowled with her father, Carl, every Sunday afternoon. Before long, plaques and ribbons covered her bedroom walls. “As a kid, getting a big trophy is everything to you,” she says.
College was a transition for Dunkin. In high school, she excelled at a sport widely regarded as something that beer drinkers do in the winter. “A lot of people — we’ll say the nonbowler — think it’s not very competitive,” she says.
But once in Warrensburg, Dunkin was surrounded by women who attacked the pins with the same ferocity. Senior Bryanna Caldwell, the reigning Division II player of the year, once bowled a perfect game in competition.
Caldwell wants to continue to bowl once her eligibility expires. But her options are limited. The Professional Women’s Bowling Association folded in 2003. The players who aren’t ready to retire their custom-drilled balls have to wait for irregularly staged women’s tournaments — or play against men.
“I would definitely try to bowl with men,” Caldwell says. “They don’t intimidate me one bit.”
For now, though, beating Vandy will do.
Perched on the back of a plastic seat behind the scorer’s table, Ron Holmes watches his bowlers scrimmage in two teams of five. In a style of play called the Baker format, the players on each side bowl two frames, creating a single team score.
“Switch lanes and do it again,” Holmes says after Team A beats Team B by two pins.
Holmes has watched several thousand pins fall on these lanes, which are open to the public and glow in the dark on weekends. He bowled on the men’s club team as an undergraduate in the late 1980s. He started coaching the men’s and women’s teams while he was getting his master’s degree in exercise and sports science.
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Central Missouri’s club teams attracted good players from greater Kansas City and beyond. But success, Holmes says, tended to come and go.
Then, in 1995, Holmes and school officials decided that Central Missouri could make a name for itself in bowling. Holmes hit the recruiting trail, traveling to high school bowling hotbeds such as Chicago. He lined up guest speakers. He bought a ball driller.
His efforts began to pay off. In 1998, the Jennies made the finals of the intercollegiate team championship in Madison, Wisconsin. ESPN2 televised the event, which was held in an arena. In the final frame, Holmes and his players huddled together while a player on the opposing team, Morehead State, rolled a strike to end their season’s dream.
In 2003, the Jennies won the championship by beating the top three seeds in the tournament. A brave coaching decision helped secure the victory. Holmes benched Amber Gazverde, the team’s star player, when lane conditions made it difficult for her left-handed stroke to find the pocket — that spot just behind the head pin that creates maximum damage. “I just kind of went with a gut instinct with what I saw, and fortunately it worked in our favor,” Holmes recalls.
Holmes, who stopped coaching the men in 2001, is low-key. He speaks slowly and softly when he wants to make a point. He’s more likely to punish a sloppy practice with extra abdominal crunches than with a thrown clipboard.
Today’s practice frustrates Holmes. The scrimmage scores are low, and he faults his players for failing to make the necessary adjustments — changing balls, taking aim from a different board. He tells his team simply, “Find something to make it work.”
Later, the bowlers perform a drill in which they must bowl a strike or a spare across four lanes. They return to Lane 1 if they leave open a frame.
The drill takes longer to complete than Holmes thinks it should. “We’re just spinning our wheels here,” he says.
Caldwell and junior Jamie Mitchell, two starters, finish last. When they finally complete the circuit, Holmes collects the team and asks which lanes were oily and which were dry. Competitive bowlers stew on the question of lane oil. On a “wet” lane, the ball will carry longer before it begins to hook. Oil placement is crucial. Most bowling alleys apply it in such a way that recreational players can easily find the pocket. It’s a marketing tool. Better scores mean happier customers.
Serious bowlers compete on less forgiving surfaces, and they resent that strike-friendly lanes have cheapened scoring. Holmes keeps copies of a chart showing that a score of 181 on the conditions his players face is like a 200 at the local AMF.
Today’s practice ends with the Jennies missing the pocket on purpose so that they can work on spares. Bowling is not the most physically demanding sport, but extended play is hell on hands. Teams pack Super Glue and Nu Skin in tackle boxes to treat thumbs and fingers damaged when the bowling ball releases and makes that thwok sound.
“My hand hurts, Ron,” Gerding says.
“We’re all in pain,” junior Alyssa Surges says, echoing her teammate.
The players put on their sweats and trudge over to the multipurpose building for a cardio workout. Their physiques may not be uniformly sleek, but Central Missouri bowlers are like any other Division II student athletes, balancing team demands with class, homework and social lives. Their status is partly due to Title IX, the 1972 federal law that ensures equality of opportunity in education. Women’s bowling helps athletic departments even out their numbers. (Including bowling, Central Missouri offers eight sports for women — the same number offered for the men.)
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Yet in some ways, today’s best women bowlers are less fortunate than those who learned the game before gender equity.
Judy Soutar turned professional at age 16. She signed a contract with the Brunswick ball manufacturer before she graduated from Paseo High School in 1962.
Soutar started bowling when she was 4. Her parents owned the Country Club Bowl at 71st Street and McGee. Every day after school, she bowled for a couple of hours before dinner — and she developed into an expert spare shooter. On her father’s instructions, the pin boys set up common second shots (like the 2-4-5) for her to master. “He wouldn’t let me just bowl,” Soutar says.
Bowling was extremely popular when Soutar turned pro. Alleys were packed with league players wearing matching shirts.
At Country Club Bowl, Soutar recalls, “You couldn’t get into a league unless someone quit or passed away.”
The men’s tour was on the verge of entering into its first contract with the ABC television network. In 1964, bowler Don Carter joined up with Ebonite to become the first pro athlete with a million-dollar endorsement deal.
Soutar flourished with the sport. Sportswriters named her bowler of the year twice in the 1970s. She spent 250 days a year on the road, competing and making appearances.
“If I didn’t cash in at a tournament, I was still going to get a paycheck from Brunswick,” Soutar says. In 1975, she bowled at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas for a chance to win $50,000. (She lost in the semifinals of the winner-take-all event.)
Soutar and her second husband, professional bowler Dave Soutar, lived in Grandview and, later, Leawood. When she and Dave traveled, her mother watched the kids — each brought two children into the marriage. Soutar says she and her husband never seemed to have an off year at the same time, making the time they spent apart from each other and their kids more tolerable. “We were lucky in that respect,” says Soutar, who now lives in Bradenton, Florida.
Soutar retired from competitive bowling in 1990, just as the professional game was beginning to wane. PWBA events that had attracted 150 entrants were doing well to get 80 by the time Soutar made her exit. ABC slashed the amount it paid for the rights to broadcast the men’s tour before parting ways with the circuit in 1997.
A trio of former Microsoft executives purchased the flagging men’s tour in 2000, and today, with a title sponsor (Denny’s) and a television home (ESPN), the circuit enjoys a measure of health.
No tech millionaires came to the women’s rescue. On August 11, 2003, the PWBA announced that its fall swing was canceled for lack of operating funds.
“It was devastating,” says Kelly Kulick, the PWBA’s rookie of the year in 2001. “All of a sudden, without warning, it just stopped — dead-ended,” she tells The Pitch from her home in Union, New Jersey.
After bowling at Morehead State — Kulick’s the one who rolled the strike that denied Central Missouri that 1998 intercollegiate championship — Kulick looked forward to a long and prosperous career as a pro. She had the skills and she liked life on the road. “I don’t mind doing laundry in the laundromat,” she says.
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With no place to showcase her talents, Kulick gave lessons, helped in the office of her father’s auto-body shop and practiced. Then something improbable happened. In 2006, she outbowled 133 men (and two women) over five grueling days to win a seasonlong berth on the Professional Bowlers Association Tour.
But Kulick’s 2006-07 season didn’t go as well as she’d hoped. Her best finish on the tour was 17th place. Still, just making the tour was a great achievement, one that Kulick didn’t appreciate until the season ended. “I didn’t fail,” she says. “But it drives me more to go back out there and try it again.”
Though the PWBA remains defunct, opportunities to bowl for cash still exist. The U.S. Bowling Congress sponsors an open championship and a women’s tournament — the USBC Queens, which Kulick won in 2007, taking home a $30,000 prize. Last fall, women’s tournaments ran concurrently at four Denny’s PBA Tour stops; top prize was $10,000 each week.
Kulick, who is 30, wants to keep bowling. “I still feel like there’s more ahead of me,” she says.
But she’s disappointed and a little surprised that the PWBA hasn’t made a comeback. “Our ratings were even better than NHL hockey,” she says.
A few hours a week, Mission Bowl prohibits smoking and drinking. The ban is in effect whenever high school bowling teams come to play or practice.
On this Tuesday afternoon, the Shawnee Mission North boys’ and girls’ teams are preparing for the start of the season, which lasts from January through March. Head coach Sarah Derks, a science teacher at North, segregates the sexes, though the players seem more interested in the snack bar than in flirting.
North’s bowling program is three years old. Derks coaches the team with the assistance of Anna Dierking, an elementary-school teacher whose family owns Mission Bowl. Dierking bowled at Southwest Missouri State before transferring to Central Missouri and playing for Coach Holmes.
Bowling wasn’t offered when Dierking and Derks were in high school. But today, 61 schools in Kansas have programs, up from 28 in 2005. When Turner High School in Kansas City, Kansas, announced the formation of a new team last fall, more than 100 students attended an informational meeting; 49 tried out.
Because boys and girls can compete simultaneously, the sport is relatively inexpensive, requiring less in coaching and travel expenses. It also creates opportunities for students who may lack the grace and athleticism necessary for other competitive sports. Derks says an eclectic group came out for the first North team. “I had some athletes who were into football and volleyball,” she says. “And I had others where I was like, ‘Where did you come from?'”
North’s best player, Vanessa Sanders, is a two-sport athlete: She also runs hurdles on the track team. But she’s had more success on the lanes. As a sophomore, she finished seventh at last year’s state championship.
At the Mission Bowl practice, Sanders finishes a game with two strikes and a spare. Pin counts are easy to read in most bowlers’ faces, yet Sanders tends to look embarrassed, whatever the outcome. As she bowls, teammates Kate Lusher and Sammy Jo Claussen play tic-tac-toe on the side of a foam cup.
In her second game, Sanders shoots a 163, a decent score for most girls on the varsity team but below her standards. “This is what I do: sucking,” she says.
The conversation at the scorer’s table turns to players’ reactions when they roll a strike. Claussen, a junior with two-tone hair, mimics one opponent who made a forceful “X” with her arms after bowling a strike: “She went full-on, like, schwaaa!”
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The girls describe another player who posed like a ballerina upon release, a memory that causes Claussen to lose her concentration and roll a gutter ball. “I was thinking of this the whole time,” Claussen says, holding her arms aloft, ballet-style.
As a group, North’s players probably lack the polish to bowl at a place like Central Missouri. Sanders says she has thought about bowling on a club team at the University of Kansas.
Though their bowling may not produce any scholarships, the North girls hold their own against the competition.
On January 10, at College Lanes in Overland Park, the girls (and the boys) beat Shawnee Mission South and Maranatha Academy.
In the final game of that meet, Sanders started out slowly before rolling 214. When her work was finished, she wrote her scores on her hand with a ballpoint pen.
“Could have been a lot worse,” she said before chatting with her mother, Marsha, who sat at a table and watched.
As an announcer read the final scores over the public-address system, a group of North bowlers surrounded Coach Derks. Ellie Davidson wanted to know whether the results were going to be broadcast over the school’s P.A. system.
“Will there be an announcement tomorrow?” she asked. “Will they say our name?”
On a Friday afternoon in January, Ray Munguia watches his granddaughter, Bryanna Caldwell, stare down the pins.
“C’mon, girl,” Munguia says.
Caldwell rolls a strike.
“Attaway, girl,” Munguia says.
Munguia is standing behind the portable metal bleachers set up for Central Missouri’s one and only home meet of the season. He wears diamond earrings, and his mustache is shaped like a silver triangle. He and his wife, Martha, and Bryanna’s parents, Dallas and Monica, flew into Kansas City from Tucson, Arizona, to watch the meet.
An accomplished bowler himself, Munguia bought Caldwell her first ball. Back then, he thought her interest in the game was just a phase. But soon, he was letting his own game rust in order to accompany his only child’s only child to tournaments. “That’s one thing I would never give up — watching her bowl,” he says.
As a teenager, Caldwell bowled so well that she earned enough scholarship money to pay for her first year of school. “She’s real competitive,” Munguia says. “She hates to lose.”
Competitiveness runs in the family. Dallas Caldwell used to race dirt bikes. “We have a family motto: You either come home first or you come home bloody,” Monica Caldwell says.
Her long brown curls pulled into a ponytail, Bryanna Caldwell anchors the Central Missouri team as it takes on Fontbonne University in the first match of the day. Five players from each side bowl a full game; their cumulative scores determine the winner.
Fontbonne, a Catholic school in St. Louis, is outgunned. The team starts a Wednesday Addams lookalike with messages (“slow down,” “relax”) taped on the toes of her shoes. Another Fontbonne player appears to be in her 40s.
The Jennies look smart in red bowling shirts and black shorts. The team used to have to wear pantyhose, but Holmes lifted the restriction last season, after Nike sent longer shorts. “It’s very welcome,” Assistant Coach and former Jennies bowler Sara Cox says of the change.
Central Missouri defeats Fontbonne by 99 pins. Caldwell bowls 236 (which, according to Holmes’ chart, is like 250 on commercial lanes).
Caldwell’s mother and grandmother sit in the bleachers while her father and grandfather hang back near the Coke machines. In addition to relatives and boyfriends, a group of first-graders has come to watch. Central Missouri sends its student athletes into Warrensburg elementary schools, and the class that Gerding visits has come to see her play. “Let’s go, Ally!” they scream through missing baby teeth.
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Central Missouri next faces Minnesota State and loses. The Jennies improve in the following match. But the opponent, Elmhurst College, rolls an uncharacteristically high score and wins by 47 pins.
Holmes changes his starters before the penultimate match of the day. He turns to Amanda Falk, a 5-foot-1 left-hander, and Dunkin.
In the second frame, Caldwell bowls a strike. Turning way from the fallen pins, she looks fierce. “C’mon! Let’s go!” she implores during the ritual exchange of high-fives and fist bumps with her teammates.
Caldwell bowls strikes in nine of the 10 frames for 266, the high game of the day. But her teammates let her down, shooting scores ranging from 167 to 177. Arkansas State wins by 21 pins.
Before the match, Holmes had gathered his players and told them to stay focused on what they were doing and not just go through the motions. Now, it seems like they didn’t hear him.
Before the final contest, against the defending national champions, Holmes opts for the silent treatment.
The Jennies get off to the start they’ll need to beat Vanderbilt, which is 4-0 on the day. Dunkin, who was wobbly against Arkansas State, opens with a spare and three strikes.
Dunkin’s parents, Carl and Tammy, cheer from the bleachers. Bowling parents seem to be especially passionate, perhaps because of the bonds forged while playing the game together. Carl Dunkin beams when he talks about his daughter’s abilities. “I think I did my job,” he says. “The kid throws a very dominating ball.”
The teams switch lanes between frames. After the sixth frame changeover, the Vanderbilt squad shows signs of stress. “Let’s keep it clean!” one of the players says to her teammates, worry creeping into her voice.
In the eighth frame, one of Vanderbilt’s best players, Michelle Peloquin, bowls a strike. “This isn’t over. Let’s go!” she says, running the high-five gauntlet.
Dunkin answers with a strike and a smile.
Alyssa Surges finishes with 211. Dunkin rolls 202. Falk bowls 238 and, because of her small stature, seems to disappear when her teammates congratulate her. “Nice game, Mandy!” Cox calls from the bleachers. “I can’t see you, but maybe you can hear me.”
After senior Sam Swanson completes a 158, Caldwell rolls the Jennies’ final frame. It’s a strike. After another strike and a nine in the bonus, she registers 224.
Final score: Central Missouri, 1033; Vanderbilt, 944.
The day finished, the players from the six teams pack their equipment and dress for the cold. The Jennies seem displeased that they lost three matches. But the Vanderbilt game is encouraging.
“Finally, there at the end, they decided they wanted to wake up and try to make an effort,” Holmes says. “When they do that, they can play with anybody. When they don’t, we’re very average.”
Caldwell says her game improved when she got angry. “I bowl better when I’m mad,” she says. “I was just fed up of struggling, when it wasn’t that hard of a shot. It was pretty playable. So I just told myself, ‘Hey, it’s not hard. Just go out and play. Go bowl.'”
The team planned to gather that night at Caldwell’s house off-campus. Her family was making tacos and rice. “We actually make Mexican food, since we’re Mexican,” Monica Caldwell says.
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Today’s matches began at 1 p.m. At 6:30, Munguia and other relatives are still waiting for the players to emerge from a postgame meeting in Coach Holmes’ office.
As the loved ones wait, the bowling alley reopens to the public. Two young couples set up on Lane 10. One of the women is the first to bowl. She rolls two gutter balls.
