Our trip begins at 3am, Thursday morning, by loading up the 12 passenger Sprinter Van. Always plenty of room for the bowling balls and luggage. Most of the girls slept while, I got to enjoy a little morning sunrise right before arriving to Houston Hobby Airport. After checking all the balls/luggage on to the plane, we grabbed a bite to eat before hoping on our 3:30 hour plane ride to Newark Airport. This is where I get my cat nap!

Ah! We safely arrived in Newark, grabbed the mini vans to load up our balls/luggage and off to the lanes we go to get to our practice in. Panera Bread was our quick stop for lunch before arriving at Brunswick Zone Carolier. Now, we are all tired and truly do not want to move, but we grind out a practice session that played pretty similar to our lanes back home. Most everyone used high end equipment, like the Storm Crux, Roto Grip Sinister, and Storm IQ line.

The line we were playing for the most part, a slight swing hitting about 13ish at the arrows to 10ish at the breakpoint. The pattern was 42' with a 2.67:1 ratio.

Friday and Saturday are all Team games(11 matches total) which each team bowls 5 players in a league format. Each match is a one game match where as the tournament was based on total pinfall. We also have an All Tournament team which the player must bowl all 11 games and they took the top 10. After Friday and Saturday wrapped up, SFA had two players make All-Tournament Team and we qualified 3rd out of 26 Teams. For the second-straight tournament, freshman Stephanie Schwartz lead the way in the individual standings with an average of 225.45, besting her nearest competitor by nearly six pins. King finished in eighth with a 207.36. Our match play record was 9-1 including a bye match.

We then get seeded into our brackets going into Sunday. Sunday has a different format for match play which is a Best of 7 Baker style. Shot making was not the greatest and we just we not in the same mental state as we were Friday and Saturday. We lost all 3 matches on Sunday dropping us down to 6th for our finish out of 26 teams. After bowling was completed, we had a quick meeting to talk about how the day went. Now time to relax, get that day out of our head and enjoy going downtown to Times Square in New York.

We parked our vans by the train station and rode the train to 33rd St which puts us a couple blocks away from Times Square. It was pretty windy that day along with the New York Marathon going/wrapping up that same day. It is crazy to me how such a big city can shut down certain roads and still function. While walking towards Times Square, we ran into a stretch of food tents and as we were ordering from one tent(Gyro's, Chicken and Beef), a wind gust knocked over a very tall tent just missing a few people standing by it. Once we got to Time Squares, we gave the girls 2 hours to explore on their own and to meet back by the famous red stairs where Mr. Francis P. Duffy's statue is located. The wife and I hit up the Disney store(whoo hoo), Hersey's store, and Build-A-Bear store. On the way out of the town we hit up Jr's Cheesecake and Abitino's Pizza.

All in all, it was a good tournament. We headed back knowing what we need to work and build off of to improve our future tournaments. With that being said, Practice Practice Practice!

Steve Lemke Bowling.com SFA NCAA Coach