Bowling Club at UCF

The 2009 Junior Team USA Women’s Bowling Team earned gold medals Friday in team and all-events at the 2009 Pan American Bowling Confederation Youth Championships in Bogota, Columbia. Three of the ten-member team are from UCF: Jennifer Boisselle, Dayna Galganski, and Kristie Petravich.

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By Kyle Hightower
Orlando Sentinel Staff Writer

Pat Costello is in the USBC Hall of Fame for her performances on the lanes. She’d rather be remembered, though, for something she is trying to get accomplished in a meeting room.

The UCF women’s club bowling team, of which Costello is the coach, could clear a big hurdle today in its attempt to achieve varsity status. The UCF Athletics Association meets today, and among its agenda items is a proposal for bowling to become a recognized NCAA sport.

The UCF Student Government Association has passed a resolution in support of it. All that is missing is the support of the athletic association.

This academic year there are 46 colleges bowling under NCAA auspices, including two in Florida — Bethune-Cookman and Florida A&M.

The push for varsity status is not a new endeavor at UCF. Women’s club founder and UCF faculty advisor Lynn Carpenter has worked closely with Costello since the men’s and women’s clubs started five years ago. Costello said they thought they were close to getting recognition under former AD Steve Sloan. But when Sloan left in 2002 for the Tennessee-Chattanooga, everything stalled.

With steadily growing interest locally and nationally, they are hoping this time will be different.

“It takes a lot of time and energy to do it right,” Costello said. “This is something that can really be a boost to UCF’s athletic profile, and I think the athletic department sees that.”

Figures from various sources — including the NCAA’s “Achieving Gender Equity Manual,” the United States Bowling Congress and state high school athletic associations — show that there are more than 16,000 female participants at 1,494 high schools in the United States that offer female varsity bowling.

That popularity is spilling over into the college ranks. Even though the school only has a club program, Costello receives inquiries from high schoolers about bowling for UCF.

From an institutional standout, probably the biggest plus for UCF would be in the area of Title IX compliance. The NCAA recognizes women’s bowling as an equivalency sport, which puts a limit on the value of financial aid that can be offered. According to NCAA bylaws, women’s bowling has an equivalency value of five, which permits an institution to grant five full-amount scholarships for an academic year.

These grant-in-aid awards can be given as five full individual scholarships or may be distributed among team members. A standard college team uses five players per match, with a traveling squad of up to eight players.

The USBC, the national governing body for bowling as recognized by the U.S. Olympic Committee, maintains three separate figure sets on what it would cost a university to field a bowling program: low-end, mid-range and high-end. Not counting scholarships but factoring in competition fees, lodging, transportation, meals, practice, equipment and uniforms, a low-end program has an estimated price tag of $17,450, a mid-range $38,150 and a high-end $64,410.

Costello estimates that a championship-caliber NCAA program would cost around $200,000 a year to operate.

Outoing UCF AD Steve Orsini said last week that the school is approaching the process cautiously.

“It’s still something I haven’t signed off on yet,” he said. “We just don’t want to do it; we want to do it right.”

The USBC Intercollegiate Championships are this week in Rockford, Ill.; they are open to NCAA schools, club teams and junior-college teams. The UCF men’s and women’s club teams have qualified, and in the final women’s poll, UCF was ranked No. 3 in the nation.

Official participation numbers weren’t kept until the formation of the USBC in 2005. But schools started giving women’s bowling programs varsity status as early as 1997 when Nebraska gave its team recognition. But it wasn’t until 2003, when Fairleigh Dickinson became the 40th institution with a varsity team, that women’s bowling was elevated to championship status in the eyes of the NCAA. The first women’s NCAA bowling championship was held the next year. At the USBC national convention held at the Orlando Convention Center last week, several prominent female bowlers were on hand to honor this year’s Hall of Fame inductees.

“I see it all as an opportunity for not only women’s collegiate bowling but for women’s collegiate sports overall, ” said Virginia Norton, 53, a Hall of Famer who has been around the sport for more than 40 years. “Now starting at the high school level, the kids are looking up to something they can get involved in. That’s a big step.”

That is what Costello wants to see fostered at UCF.

“Some schools won’t give it [bowling] the time of day,” she said. “UCF has, and we are thankful for that. But this is a crucial time for us. All we can do is dot the I’s and cross the T’s.”

UCF bowlers strike seventh at national competition
By Natalie Rodriguez
A group of UCF student bowlers smashed pins and raised eyebrows with a seventh place finish at the Intercollegiate Bowling Championship April 24-26. The men’s and women’s teams both qualified for the tournament this year, and traveled to Tulsa, Okla., to compete.

The UCF teams were both eliminated in the fourth round April 24, with the men falling to Nebraska and the women to Florida State.

The Central Missouri State University women and Wichita State University men won their respective competitions to claim the national titles.

The competition was the second national tournament appearance for the UCF men’s team, which placed 13th in 2002.

To reach the national tournament this year, the men’s and women’s teams competed in a sectional tournament in Louisville, Ky. March 22, where the men finished in first place. The women took third.

In the national tournament, UCF teams competed against 15 other universities, including Penn State University, Florida State University, West Texas A&M University, California State University at Fresno, and Arizona State University.

This year the team raised $40,000 on its own for travel and other expenses, with help from the UCF Bowling Club and Aloma Bowling Centers of Central Florida, including the Boardwalk Bowl, which donate bowling lanes for the team to practice.

The team had no Student Government Association funding this year, but was given $1,000 in 2002 and hopes for funding next year, said Assistant Coach Lynn Carpenter.

Carpenter teaches a bowling class at UCF; she started the team in 2001 with junior Matt Niad. Head Coach Pat Costello, who has been a professional bowler for 30 years and was named one of the top 20 bowlers of the 20th century, coaches both the men’s and women’s teams. She is assisted by men’s coach Bob Schoneman and women’s coaches Carpenter and Jerry McDonald.

The captain of the men’s team, senior Mike Donahue, 21, said what motivates him to bowl is a love of the game. He wants to bowl professionally some day.

Donahue got involved in bowling by the age of 3. “My mom bought me a bowling ball for my third birthday and took me out to the bowling center, and I enjoyed it and kept on going,” he said. As he grew up, he realized that he could make a career out of bowling. He’s been working at it ever since.

Most of the members of the team have been bowling since they could lift a ball, which is why freshman Stefanie Nation, 19, said with a smile, “Bowling is my second life, and I’ll never get tired of it.” Nation said she decided to study at UCF specifically because of the UCF Bowling Team.

Nation said her parents put her in a bowling league when she was 5 years old. From that point on, bowling has been a part of her life.

Senior Linda Martinez, 22, and freshman Bryan Farley, 18, said their fathers had the greatest influence on their bowling. Martinez’s father managed the Aloma bowling alley. Farley’s dad coached his high school bowling team.

Despite their national-level prowess, members of the team play in obscurity, without recognition from SGA or fellow students. “People don’t know there is a bowling team and when they do [find out] they are kind of surprised,” Farley said.

The captain of the women’s team, Martinez, said that if there is one thing everyone should know, it is this: “Bowling is a sport and we are athletes.”

“What is important to realize is that these kids work hard,” said Carpenter, who wants people to recognize the time and effort that each one of them gives to the sport and their studies.

The bowling season ended with the national tournament. Play will resume next fall; the UCF team will start practicing the week before classes resume.