The Garfield BowlDogs

A sneak peek into Garfield’s first-ever bowling team.

By+Caroline+Ashby

By Caroline Ashby

Some know bowling as a game played with friends and family Friday night or over the weekend, but for others, it’s played during the week as a competitive sport. This year, for the first time ever, Garfield will have a women’s bowling team called the Garfield BowlDogs. The Garfield BowlDogs will be joining the winter lineup and be coached by Garfield’s Athletic Director Ms. Lynch. Before bowling came to Garfield, there were conventions between schools deciding if they would introduce bowling to their schools. 

 

“Eight of Metro’s schools said, ‘Yes, we’ll have a bowling team,’. There are two private and six public schools [participating in bowling this year],” Lynch said. Garfield is a part of both the Metro League and the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association. The WIAA is an organization that creates rules for middle and high school sports in Washington, while the Metro League is a conference who holds 18 schools. 

 

“Bowling has been a part of the WIAA for girls for 12 to 15 years, but the Metro League didn’t have [bowling],” Lynch said. Since the Metro League didn’t have bowling, most schools created clubs that were co-ed or the schools went to other leagues. Coming this spring, Lynch hopes to bring a co-ed bowling club to Garfield since boys can’t play the sport due to WIAA regulations and because it is a women’s  sport. 

 

“It will be a co-ed thing because there are other schools that have co-ed teams, so we can make a league and it could be fun” Lynch said. The way bowling works as a school sport is that there are five people on each team, and the team who scores the most amount of points wins. This year since seventeen girls signed up, there will be both a JV and Varsity team. One person on the team is Rachel Anderson. 

 

“I want to further develop my bowling skills and I think it will be really fun to be on a sports team again,” Anderson said. This will be Anderson’s last year at Garfield and is excited to see more girls teams come to Garfield during the winter season. 

 

“I like that there’s an all-girls sport. Girl’s sports teams are very under-supported and we give a lot of our support to the boy’s teams, but we don’t show up the girl’s team. If you look at the number of people that show up to boys varsity basketball versus girl’s varsity basketball there’s this huge disparity.” Anderson said. In the past, at Garfield, there hasn’t been a lot of support for girl teams even when there is an equal amount of both boys and girls teams. 

 

“I’m hoping fans will come to matches sometimes and cheer us on,” Lynch said.  Information about when the girls play or how one can sign up for bowling next year can all be found on Garfield’s website.