The Alberta junior female championship team from the St. Albert Bowling & Rec Centre has experience throwing strikes at nationals.
Three of the four bowlers have competed in the Youth Bowl Canada fivepin tournament, which starts May 7 in Calgary.
“Provincials is very competitive but nationals is a whole new step of competitiveness. You’re all there because you want to win,” said Kamryn Collins.
“You all think you’re the best because it’s nationals,” added Sarah Schnepf, a junior teammate of Collins last year as Alberta finished out of the medals at nationals in Oshawa, Ont.
Eight teams bowl seven games a day and 21 overall at the three-day competition.
“They’re all from different places so it’s kind of harder to deal with the pressure,” said Kayle Mak, who bowled with Schnepf on the Alberta junior team at the 2014 nationals in Winnipeg. “It’s also so loud there. Everyone is cheering for their own teams so you have to cheer 10 times louder and usually you lose your voice.”
Schnepf agreed.
“Nationals are very loud but it’s fun,” said Schnepf, 15. “You get to see people from last year if you’ve bonded before and if not it’s a new experience, how to get out of your shell and talk to people and trade things with different provinces.”
It also helps bring the bowlers closer together as a team. They qualified as the top four junior females in singles as the house winners of their bowling alley to create a foursome for the Edmonton and area zone roll-offs for a shot at the YBC 4 Steps to Stardom provincials and hopefully nationals.
“When we were in the hotel there was team bonding that we did before the competition and we just learned more about each other,” said Mak, 13.
Alexandra Hahn is the newbie of the bunch for nationals.
“It’s really exciting,” said the Grade 9 Lorne Akins student. “It should be fun.”
Hahn (645), Schnepf (632), Mak (765) and Collins (854) rolled four games for a team average of 724 at provincials in February at St. Albert.
Hahn, 14, said “it helped a little bit” provincials were staged in her home alley.
“I was still nervous,” said the sixth-year bowler.
Provincials were too close to call until the St. Albert team prevailed in the last game to edge Paradise Lanes of Calgary (709 average) by 60 pins.
“It was really scary. We didn’t know what was going to happen because one of the bowling centres did amazing,” said Mak, who has thrown strikes for six years. “Usually we would know what would happen and that day we didn’t have no idea.”
Collins led the way in the last game with a 218 average as the only St. Albert bowler to break 200.
“She was our anchor. She is the only reason why we actually made it because we were bowling pretty low games,” said Schnepf, a bowler for nine years.
Collins, 14, described the outcome as a “pleasant surprise.”
“We didn’t realize Paradise Lanes was going to be such big competition. The first game we were looking at the totals and we had the highest total and than we were watching Paradise Lanes and their total was very close to ours so we knew that was definitely our biggest competition,” said the Grade 9 Hillcrest School student.
“In the second game we had I think a really low total and they had a really high total and in the next game their anchor, I think she had an injured wrist so her wrist was acting up, but the rest of the team was still doing good but we had a really high game total,” the sixth-year bowler added. “In the last game I think we were only beating them by 100 points. It was very close because by the fifth frame they had a higher total than us and then we had to do this huge pep talk in order to get us all back into the spirit.”
The girls are coached by Gord Mapstone of Spruce Grove, who is also going to his third nationals, and last weekend they won a tournament at the Bonnie Doon Bowling Lanes in preparation for nationals.
“All of us did really well so we’re pretty excited,” said Mak, a Grade 8 Sir George Simpson student.
Their energies are focused on a high placing at nationals.
“We want to at least medal. That’s our big goal,” said Schnepf, a Grade 9 Rosslyn School student.
