It’ll be a perfect game of fun and friends for those who join the Wakeland bowling club. The club gives students who enjoy bowling the opportunity to compete and be a part of a team.  This year is the fourth year for Wakeland’s team.  Senior Zach Smullen is one of the seniors who started the club.

“We needed to start a club so that we [could] have a team [and] bowl against other schools.  It gave me that chance to compete, and it gave other people that chance to compete as well,” Smullen said.  

The club has certainly given students the opportunity to compete with a schedule consisting of about 10 matches a year.

“[At the matches] there are five people and they’ll all bowl head to head against somebody [from] another school.  Then, we’ll have [three] team match[es], where each person will bowl two frames.  You can get points for winning different matches, and whoever has the most points at the end of the night wins,” Smullen said.

The team will need to keep knocking down pins and tallying points for them to be successful.  Similar to other sports, they have a varsity and a junior varsity team.  With the matches being so intense, they require a lot of preparation.

“We practice once a week, and we have a match like once every other week.  We practice at Strikz on Tuesday afternoons [with an out-of-school coach].  Sometimes we’ll work on specific stuff.  A lot of times we’re just working on bowling in a team format [be]cause it’s something that [nobody] has experience with before the bowling team starts.  We also work on hitting spares,” Smullen said.

The bowling club clearly takes a lot of work on the students’ part to ensure that they are successful each match.  Similar to other clubs at Wakeland, they need a teacher sponsor.  Mr. Kerr is the teacher sponsor for the club. 

“I’m not very involved as a sponsor.  It’s basically a student-led club, and I’m sponsoring it.  I’m just making sure that everything is right with the paperwork [for the club to be sustained year after year] but other than that, it’s really student-led,” Mr. Kerr said.

Not only does the club give students the opportunity to compete and bowl, but it also gives students the opportunity to grow as leaders.  The club has members from all grade levels.  Zach’s younger brother, Owen Smullen, who is a freshman, talked about why he joined the club.

“I wanted to take part in an extracurricular activity and felt like bowling would be a good choice for me because I enjoy doing it,” Owen said.

With the club having so many graduating seniors, it is going to need new members to keep it going strong after they leave.

“It’s just a fun environment.  It gives people a good chance to work with others and also just meet new friends,”  Zach Smullen said.

People who are thinking about joining the club can look forward to competing and having fun with their friends.  The season started on November 15 and goes through February.  They won their last match on December 2 against Centennial 11-4.  They will be back in action on January 6th at 5:30 PM against Boyd at Strikz.