Men’s Bowling Finishes Seventh at Eagle Invitational
BELTON, Mo. – In a strong team showing on their home lanes, the Avila men's bowling team qualified for bracket play for the first time this season and ultimately finished ranked seventh at the 2024 Eagle Bowling Invitational this weekend at Aaron's Family Fun Center in Belton.
Avila's first home tournament of the year brought with it the best performance of the season for the Eagle men. Not every young program – and Avila's only in year three – gets to host a home event, but head coach Paul Wolf along with his partners at Aaron's, led by Mike Seroka, have now successfully pulled off this event two years in a row.
It's certainly no easy feat, but it's worth it for the athletes to have a "home" event and for Avila fans to not have to travel all over the country just to watch the athletes compete for a weekend, Wolf said on Eye on the Eagles this week. And his team, under the direction of assistant coach Quentin Mamer, made that investment pay off with undoubtedly their best performance of the season.
In a 13-team field that featured teams representing schools from NCAA Division I and II as well as the NAIA, the Avila men had a strong showing on Saturday to start the weekend. Bryce Stewart, the team's lone senior competing on his senior weekend, stole the show: he served as the anchor bowler for much of the weekend and paid off that faith, shooting north of 200 in four of the five team games Saturday and finishing with an average of 209.6, good for seventh in the entire field and just missing out on a spot in the All-Tournament Team: Stewart knocked down just 18 fewer pins than the bowlers who finished in fifth.
Evan Serrage and Brody Stanback were also each safely in the top 25 scores in a field of about 120 bowlers that threw a ball on Saturday. That included junior varsity totals from the competition over at Summit Lanes in Lee's Summit, where Colton Cline led the pack with an average of 195.
The Eagles finished in sixth place as a team on Saturday and dipped but only slightly to seventh after the slate of Baker games on Sunday morning. That was still more than good enough for Avila to get into the double-elimination bracket reserved for the top eight teams on Sunday afternoon, the first time the Eagles have reached match play this season. There, Avila had to face No. 2-seeded Southern Nazarene, a school that normally competes in the NCAA DII level of athletics.
The Storm are a brand new team in men's bowling, but they looked like one of the best squads in the building on this weekend. In a best two-of-three series SNU won game one handily, but the Avila crew of Stewart, Stanback, Max Sturgeon, Aidan Tesdall and Nic Garza, was not ready to go down without a real fight. In fact, in game two of the series, the team scores were the exact same through five frames. The difference was the Storm hit one or two shots that the Eagles did not, and that knocked the Eagles out of the tournament in the first round. SNU ultimately made the title series, falling to No. 3 Oklahoma Christian in four games.
With the second annual Eagle Invitational now officially in the books, Avila men's bowling will next make the short trip over to Lawrence for a massive regional NAIA event this Saturday and Sunday. It's essentially two different tournaments spread out over two completely full days of bowling with a lot of prestige and points on the line. As always, you can watch all the action on the Avila Bowling Facebook pages, and stay tuned to our social media pages for plenty of live coverage.
