Women’s Bowling Finishes Fifth at Eagle Invitational
BELTON, Mo. – In a strong team showing on their home lanes, the Avila women's bowling team qualified for bracket play for the first time this season and ultimately finished in fifth place 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 women. 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 under the direction of the former bowling professional, a shorthanded Eagle women's squad 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 small but mighty group of Eagle women stayed consistent all weekend, finishing in fifth after five team games on Saturday and holding firm to that position after the set of Baker games on Sunday morning to qualify for bracket play for the first time this season on Sunday afternoon.
Sophomore Claire Busch has inherited the anchor bowler spot this semester and certainly looked the part at Aaron's this weekend. Busch fired off a 220 in game two on Saturday, one of the best scores by any individual all weekend, and finished with an average of 183, good for ninth in the field and just seven pins away from fifth and a spot in the All-Tournament Team. Freshman leadoff bowler Kamdyn Burman was in the top 25, and all five Eagle bowlers scored in the top 40 in a field of nearly 100 athletes that threw in a game on Saturday.
Solidly in fifth place after competition, the Eagles faced off with local rivals Baker in their first trip to the double-elimination bracket play this season. The Wildcats are usually a force in the sport that are in the midst of a "down year" by their standards, but unfortunately for the Eagles the Wildcats looked a whole lot more like the Baker women's bowling team of old on Sunday.
Baker won game one of the best-of-three series, but Avila's crew of Busch, Burman, Kirsten Zirjacks, Brittany Mohling and Victoria Leal strapped back in and threw a very strong game two. Unfortunately, on the other side of the ball return, the Wildcats cleaned almost every frame and outslugged the young Eagles, knocking Avila out in the first round of their home event. Baker ultimately made the title series, falling to top-seeded Ottawa in four games.
With the second annual Eagle Invitational now officially in the books, Avila women'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.
