One of the biggest stories for Saint Xavier University sports near the end of last year and over the summer was the inclusion of a new sports program. This program turned out to be bowling for both women and men. The bowling program started out with the signing of a head coach, a coach who turned out to be first-year coach Michael Kay. From here, the program announced the signings of both their female and male recruits.
With both a coach and a roster in place, it was time for the program to make its debut in the Boilermaker classic hosted in Lafayette, Indiana. For a first-time program, Saint Xavier University did surprisingly well as the men placed 14th out of 20 teams, while the women finished 9th out of 13 teams.
Some key performances was made by freshman Ryan Koesema. Koesema had an average score of 163.4 over the course of 5 games and a scoring high of 219 in his second game. For the women, freshman Monica Colon led the way with an average score of 162.6 over 5 games with a scoring high of 198 in game 3. The men scored a total of 4245 in the 25 games they played while the women scored 4022.
On the second day of the tournament, the women finished with an average score of 158.7 in 16 games, while the men had an average score of 167.0 in 16 total games of play. Although these aren’t the strongest performances, this is still a major event for Saint Xavier University athletics due to the sheer historic monumental moment of both the women and men competing in their first bowling competition.
The bowling team returned to action on October 7th-8th when they competed in the 47th Midwest Collegiate Tournament in Wauwatosa Wisconsin. The women finished 14th out of 32 total teams, while the men placed 22nd out of 40 teams. This again was another big historical moment for the program as Koesema again led the way as he became Saint Xavier’s first individual tournament winner.
The men’s team finished with a score of 1124 with an average score of 187.33, while the women finished with a score of 11995 with an average score 199.17.
As a new program, there’s still a lot in the air how far the team can go. This is why I took the liberty of interviewing freshmen Jon Studer and Sydney Gill. Both sounded optimistic about the upcoming season with Jon saying, “I’m excited mainly because of the fact that this is a new thing. With the program being new I feel like we have a chance to set the standard for this program, and hopefully that’s a standard of winning”.
From the sounds of this, it sounds like some of the players aren’t entirely sure what they are in store for, but are excited nonetheless as we should be. The program has recently competed in the two-day Columbia 300 Western Shootout tournament, and look to compete in the Titan Invite this upcoming November.
Let’s continue to show this program some support as it needs as much as it can get with it being new.
Kenneth Washington
Sports Reporter