The boys bowling team had started off the season strong. Initially beating Lake Mary on Aug. 19 at Airport Lanes, they played through the next few weeks with a strong success rate. On Sep. 18 they took on the Rams again, this time beating Lake Mary at the Oviedo Bowling center.
“This match is the start of our second round of the season,” coach Brittany Ziobro said. “So I would say that it’s kind of special that you beat a team twice. It’s really meaningful that [we stay] consistent.”
The boys had a total of 1913 pins, beating Lake Mary’s 1589. Top performers included Connor Jimenez with 365 pins, and Noah McPherson with 312.
“A lot of bowling is the mental side of everything,” Ziobro said. “So what we talked about is just after each frame, trying to stay positive, resetting, [and] having—if they’re kind of getting in their head—a moment where they can rebound. That self-talk is so important.”
The girls team lost their game, scoring 1606 pins compared to Lake Mary’s 1761. Ashton Zitzke, the top bowler, had 415 pins.
A bowling game has a few parts: it begins with two normal games, with five people from each team competing in each, then moves onto a Baker format at the end (in which one player competes per frame). The boys were already winning by the time the Bakers started, but hyped each other up anyway.
“Bakers is a lot of fun, because we’re all cheering and clapping for each other since it’s one person bowling, [with] the whole team behind you watching,” McPherson said. “And it gets really loud during that time, because that [can be] the difference between winning and losing the game.”
For the girls team, it has been an accomplishment to have enough players to compete at all. They began the season with an incomplete team, and have only recently filled the two empty spots needed to make winning a possibility.
“When we first saw Lake Mary, we only had a team of three girls, and now we have a full squad of five, so it kept it much more competitive,” Ziobro said. “They didn’t have a full team [the first time], so it was a pretty low score on our end.”
On both sides, teamwork plays a major role in the mindset and success of the players. Competitors’ scores get added together for the team’s total, and players cheer each other on during the match, so building a community has been one of Ziobro’s main focuses so far this year.
“This game really kind of brought both teams together, in a sense,” Ziobro said. “Showing how the girls have a full team, and what they’re capable of, then how the boys came together. And those bench players really stepped it up, and our key players really led those bench players to staying in that positive frame of mind.”
The teams will next compete against Lake Brantley on Monday, Sept. 23. The match will be held at the Oviedo Bowling Center.
“At the beginning of the year, we weren’t very close as a team because we had a lot of new people,” McPherson said. “But now we’re all getting closer as a team. We’re hyping each other up, cheering for each other, and then during the last match, we all stay up cheering on the last person. Even though we’re already done, and we already won the game, we’re still all up there, cheering everyone on.”
