My daughter, wife and I attended the 2016 Junior Gold Tournament in Indianapolis, IN. last week. For those of you not familiar with the Junior Gold each states champion get's entry supplied by Pepsi into the tournament based upon division U12, U15, and U20 divisions each with a boys and girls division. This is kind of like the USBC tournaments for kids but individual competition instead of teams. You can also qualify by winning other local youth tournaments for this competition. This year included over 3700 bowlers and 11,000 paid spectator passes so you can imagine how big this tournament is and it's all done in one week between 6 bowling alley's.
My daughter was the State Champion for WV in her age bracket U12. Unfortunately she has been in a slump all summer with her average about 25 pins lower than fall. This competition has 4 days of qualifying (4games each on a different sport pattern). After the first three days she 117th out of 121 bowlers in her division. the first two days was some of the worst I've ever seen her bowl the third day was some better and on day 4 she shot 624 yo move her into 92nd place. If she had bowled at that clip all four days she would have had a chance to make the cut unfortunately we cant always perform the way we want to on command. I was really proud of her she kept her composure better than I do when struggling and had the ability to put at least one decent day in the books.
This was her first year for this competiton. She qualified last year but we couldn't take her due to some medical issues my wife had. What really amazed me was the level of competition at the top. THe qualifying leader ended with a 179.85 average over 16 gmaes on sport patterns!! The cut was a 153 which is in my daughters ability when shes bowling well but the top 6 to 8 girls here simply amazed me for their age. My daughter simply doesn't bowl at that level yet although she does have another year in this age group. Most of these girls have approaches with the ability to post their shots and are using inside the ball release techniques that a lot of adults struggle with. Honestly I think I could struggle to beat the top few of these girls and wouldn't mind having a few of them on my scratch league they honestly are that talented from what I seen. Most haven't developed the ball speed we see in the top notch bowlers yet but I'm not sure that they don't understand how to move adjust and play different lines as well as most talented bowlers.
We had a great time and got to watch some truly talented bowlers while there. We met a lot of professional bowlers from the PBA and PWBA tours and got to watch Danielle McEwan's sister bowl, Wes Malott's son and talked with Wesley Low for a while. The even was very well run this year and we had a lot of fun. If you have a child interested in the competitive side of youth bowling this is an event that you just cant miss.
