Boys’ bowlers learn lessons from districts

Despite the boys’ bowling team’s seventh-place finish in the district tournament, senior Ayush Maddikonda called the competition great learning experience. Instead of focusing on the loss, he said he said he saw  districts as an opportunity to practice the skills he and his teammates had been learning throughout the season.

“It’s always a good experience at districts because we learned basically how to adjust in a competitive situation while we were at inter school competitions,” Maddikonda said. “It’s generally one lane or two lanes at a time, in which you just have to make transitions for one game. But here it’s three separate games. So you’re moving lanes. And it’s like, in one game, you have say two bad frames and you have to recover from it. In a three game scenario, you have to recover from a whole bad game. Say you average a 170 and you bowled a 130, you’re gonna have to try to pick it up, get some 180s-190s maybe even, and also make any off-lane adjustments when you’re trying to get out of that situation, because it’s a whole other lane.”

Another one of the bowlers, sophomore Nicholas Schroeder, expressed hope for next season.

“Districts this year, it was kind of interesting,” he said. “There were a lot of other teams there that were performing very well. However, a lot of the other teams had seniors that will no longer be here next year. So I feel like next year we will be able to perform better because the competition will be less competitive.”

Maddikonda said he adjusted his approach during the match.

”Well, I kind of saw how sometimes I was going too far out on the lane which meant the ball would not hook enough right though the goal was to get into the one three part of the pocket,” he said. “I would just hit the right side of the pins because watching other people make adjustments helped me decide that I wanted to start more on the inside a little bit more because oiling patterns can really change how the ball reacts on the way.”

The bowlers felt good going into the tournament because some of the younger bowlers had been improving, according to Maddikonda. 

“We had the morale that we’re going to go out and have fun and bowl, that’s it,” he said. “That’s all what it’s about. I was excited to see how some people would show out. Obviously, Big Mark [Morgan], he had a very good series in the conference, and he’s a relatively new bowler, I mean for a few months. He got a 490 in three games, which is an average of around 163, which is extremely good for a seventh grade bowler. And a lot of these younger kids, I’m really excited to see how they’re going to do in the future. I just wanted this last year to be one of high morale and end on a happy note.”

By Zach Engler