Southwest Tournament 2012
I haven’t been doing my blog much justice. For something I am so passionate about, I really want to convey that message to my readers, so I want to give you a better understanding about how I became involved with bowling and why I want people to be able to experience the bowling world, too.
In 2002, when I was 12 years old, my friend Ontaria invited me to a birthday party at AMF Spare Time Lanes. Before she invited me, I had never stepped into a bowling center before. The environment was interesting. It was fun, it was new, and I liked it! My mom kept sharing with me about how she had her own bowling ball and shoes when she was my age or older.
Before the birthday party was over, a woman named Gina who worked at Spare Time (who is now one of our good family friends) came up to mom and started asking her some questions that later led to us signing up for a “family fun” league on Sundays. Mom thought it would be a cool idea to do something new as mother and daughter on the weekends beside going to the mall and walking around mindlessly for hours.
It was Sunday afternoon, the first week of our new adventure. Mom got to break out her old bowling shoes and the ole gold plastic bowling ball carried in a blue leather bag. I, on the other hand got to rent shoes from the front counter and pick a bowling ball off the community ball rack … That didn’t last long! Mom took me to the pro-shop just a few weeks after we started bowling league and I got my very first bowling ball–a Columbia White Dot with green, purple, silver and sparkles in it. I also got my first pair of shoes from a friend we met in the Family Fun league.
TX Youth State Tournament
This was the beginning and I was hooked. I joined two other leagues–The STL Pros and the Classics league. The STL Pros was a youth league I bowled during the week on Tuesdays. The Classics was part of the Saturday morning league. I met many of my friends during Saturday morning bowling but met even more of the people I know today through tournament bowling.
Bowie HS Bowling Team
Five years later in 2006, at 17, I was still bowling leagues and occasionally city and state tournaments when they rolled around. These were tournaments that all of the youth bowlers could bowl, but they brought together many bowling centers’ youth programs together in one which was very exciting to me! But I wanted something more. I started bowling other tournaments outside of Spare Time and met people who were more competitive and more passionate about the sport. I also joined the high school bowling team that year which was new to the Arlington school district as a club sport.
In March 2007, I started dating a guy name Jordan who I bowled against at a few tournaments and worked at the pro-shop at Spare Time. He helped me tremendously in becoming even more involved with bowling. I started practicing a lot more often and become more interested in the idea of college bowling!
I was so interested in the idea of college bowling that I was ready to graduate high school then and there and go the university in the Fall. I told my mom about my idea, that I wanted to bowl in college and I was going to graduate high school early by taking dual credit courses in the Summer. I also already applied to West Texas A&M and e-mailed the coach about my interest in attending by the Fall 2007.
Well this was way too fast for my mom. Her little girl was running away with her dream of bowling and leaving home and going to college quickly. It kind of freaked me out, too. The short story is–I did graduate high school in the summer of 2007, but I didn’t go to West Texas in the Fall. Instead, I went to Tarrant County College from January 2008 through May 2009 part-time while I continued worked at Spare Time (which I started doing in February 2007).
Bowling never stopped though. A friend of mine from the Dallas Ft. Worth area was going to college and bowling at Robert Morris University in Peoria, Illinois. This wasn’t a school I was very familiar with when it came to “bowling schools.” I knew about West Texas because my biggest bowling idol Carolyn Dorin-Ballard graduated there. I also knew of Wichita State University, Nebraska, Vanderbilt, and Central Florida because these were schools that some of the top Junior Gold bowlers went. But not Robert Morris Peoria …
(To Be Continued).
Bowling in Wichita 
Posted on March 2, 2012
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