What is bowling?
It’s a game where you throw a ball at pins in order to score the most points on a 300 point system, against other players if it was competitive. There are lots of different (types) of bowling … but usually it’s mostly used for the ten pin game which is just used for sport and recreation.
Why do you like bowling?
I’d say it came from my dad’s side of the family … My grandfather bowled and won all of those trophies and things. I was interested and it was a good pastime, so I tried to take up with it and I got a lot of good feedback from my dad and his friends.
I’ve heard that you’re trying to start a bowling team. Why is that?
I started learning more about it from other people who used to be on the team and it just kinda got me excited. I was excited to start something on my own because I haven’t really done that type of thing before … when I heard (Grant) didn’t have a team I was disappointed because I wanted to try it. So it was just a fun idea to start a team because I had a lot of support from people. (The support) made it way easier to want the dream to keep going … It would be fun to see a bowling team one day because it would be a good pastime for after school and bowling is fun.
What happened to the old bowling team?
Well the old team was just a thing that you could sign up for where they had a whole collective team and then … they would have partners or up to four people in a group, and then they would usually just play against each other and then (during competition) they would go against schools … Somebody told me that they drove down to Bend or something this one time for a tournament. So it was just like any other sporting activity where they just had practices. Well the big thing about it that was different than other sports was you really learned how to get better at it. It was something that you could join knowing nothing about, and then get better by the end of the year, which takes a while for most sports but not for bowling. It was just like a regular sport for the school. The thing that really ended it was the Hollywood Bowling Alley leaving and being replaced by a hardware store. That made it harder to find a location to practice and stuff … I’m just kinda disappointed that they quit the team after Hollywood Bowl shut down because that would’ve been cool to see the club stick with the school rather than shutting down and then having to be restarted.
What have you done so far to start the team?
I pitched the idea to some of my (friends) and it caught on faster, I thought it wouldn’t be a thing at all, but now people want to do it and I don’t know what to do now because I didn’t think people would want to … I’m new to this, so I don’t really know how to get things started or the first step to take so we’re kinda planning it out before it can really take off that fast. We don’t want it to go too far without us knowing what we’re doing so I guess you could say we’re trying to take it slow… So, no, we haven’t really done much about it because we’re trying to get members to support it and want to be involved with it before we know that we can actually get it started.
What do you need to do moving forward?
To make it a reality we need funding and we really need to talk to the school about it … We would start by getting the idea out, making it more well known so it’s not just a little thing, it would have to be for a bigger picture so it could be for the school. Then after we had gotten a solid foundation for the idea we could start getting funding to make it happen. To get funding we’re just gonna do things like fundraisers and stuff. For example, we would have bake sales or car washes to help support it, we would do it for Grant Athletics, we would also have like a fee to join the team, so that would be part of it too.
What will the team look like?
My dad actually told me he used to bowl when he was in fifth grade and they had teams of two and (the teams) would play against each other. That sounded kinda fun … So ideally there would be an A team and a B team but we might just have one big group and then we split them up because usually when we would go to tournaments there would be pairs of people so we’d have to make that … I thought it wouldn’t be that competitive but I thought there would at least be a few schools that would try to compete.
What is your dream for this team? What do you hope it becomes?
My dream is that we get good enough at it that it will start to make other schools want to do it too, which will be hard to make happen but if that was able to happen we could have more competition and it would be more fun to bowl competitively. It’s pretty fun to play just in general and then being good at something makes it more fun. The main thing though is that my dream for the team is for it to keep continuing past a few years which would be hard to pull off but that would be the dream. That it wouldn’t fall out after a few years. The team wouldn’t collapse, the team wouldn’t stop because of an issue like not having a place to practice or something like that. We would figure things out around it to combat issues.
Why is this team good for the Grant community?
Well like most sports it really gets people to come together, like most people they build friendships and that stuff through a sport. If they did soccer, lacrosse or basketball that could happen, and bowling possibly because it’s really about making sure you have good bonds with your teammates … It’s just good to make new friends through the sport. It would be good for the community if more people could come together for something that’s not really well known. Bowling is kinda underground I guess you could say. The big benefit it could bring is just the sense of a stronger community. It could bring to the community a lot of friendships which could be great for a sport and make it seem more inviting. I guess you could just say more welcoming.
