Bowling club rolls through first year
After a successful first year, the USU bowling club is hoping to expand and increase its membership as well as its funds for next season.
Despite an inexperienced membership, coach Craig Lofthouse is rather pleased with the way the team has turned out. Just recently, the club competed in its first tournament, the Baker Tournament, in Weber.
They took seventh in the competition, which was full of opponents who were more experienced and whose programs had been around a lot longer.
“A lot of our members were competing [in a tournament] for the first time,” Lofthouse said.
Despite that, they were able to put on a pretty good showing.
Club president Tiffany Tryon, who helped start the club, said, “The bowlers have learned a lot from competition, they’ve had fun.”
The team currently meets every Friday at the Gutter inside the Cache Valley Fun Park from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. The season runs throughout the entire school year.
Tryon, who has been bowling in junior leagues for about 10 years, started the bowling club earlier in the school year.
At the time, she was helping Lofthouse teach bowling classes. She wanted to start a bowling club and convinced him to be the coach. Although Lofthouse has been bowling competitively since he was 21, this is his first time coaching.
“This is all relatively new to me, so we rely on other coaches for advice,” he said.
He expects to increase his experience at a three-day coaching convention that will be held in Las Vegas in June. While it is still new and relatively obscure, the club’s membership turnout has been good.
“We’ve got a pretty good membership,” Lofthouse said. “We hoped for 10; we have 30.”
Even so, he hopes more people will join, particularly women. Currently, there aren’t enough women to make a separate team. Because of that, Tryon and the other female bowlers have been competing with the men.
“I’d like to be able to compete on the female side,” she said.
Lofthouse plans on doing a little recruiting at a junior league tournament coming up down in Texas.
“My recruiting funds are a little low,” he said with a chuckle. “But I’d like to pass out some fliers and hopefully get some bowlers to come to USU.”
One of the ways they hope to increase membership and make more money is through a bowling tournament fundraiser that is being held between now and April 19 at the Gutter.
The competition costs $20 per team and features a grand prize of $200. Teams, which will consist of three people, can just walk in and sign up. To sweeten the deal, each game will be played in a 3-6-9 format. This means that each player will automatically get a strike in the third, sixth, and ninth frames.
“It’s a cheaper deal than bowling three games,” Lofthouse said.
The bowling club hopes to raise $1,000 with the fundraiser. The money will be used to help pay for equipment, uniforms, and among other things, travel and tournament expenses. Lofthouse said that each tournament they compete in costs around $500 a team.
Obviously, competing in tournaments is what will gain recognition.
Tryon said, “I’d like to see more sponsors. If we get out there more, we’ll get more sponsors.”
When asked if she’d like to see the club turn into a full-fledged athletic program, she said, “We’d love to make a program out of it. It’s just a matter of travel, uniforms, and equipment funding.”
-mattandersen@cc.usu.edu