This Week on Sports Page: Jennies Bowling

Don't confuse college bowling with the beer and pizza leagues at your local lanes.  It is much more complex, detailed and competitive than that! It features positions like anchor, lead-off and fourth bowler. Competition may be in a traditional fashion or may be in Baker's format.  And coaches may employ lefties or righties, along with spare specialists as the situation and lanes dictate.  As I said, this ain't the Tuesday night beer and pizza league!

This week on Sports Page we're focusing on Jennies bowling.  I got to sit down with an old friend and classmate, head coach Ron Holmes.  I also visit with senior Cayla Bortz.  

Jennies head bowling coach Ron Holmes is in his 32nd season with UCM.  He is an eight-time coach of the year, has led his team to the NCAA postseason 15 of the last 20 years, and has had five teams competing on the final day of the season.  His 2003 Jennies team earned the program's first national title at the Intercollegiate Bowling Championships (the NCAA's recognized championship for varsity women's bowling prior to 2004), and he has earned nine top-five finishes with three runner-up seasons (2004, 2005 and 2009).

Cayla Bortz has lettered all four years for the Jennies.  She received National Tenpin Coaches Association All-Academic honors every season from 2019 to 2022 and last season was academic all-conference in the Great Lakes Valley Conference and earned the GLVC James R. Spalding Sportsmanship Award.  Cayla is the Jennies team captain this year, and she has some pretty lofty goals when she graduates in May with her degree in Crisis and Disaster Management.

As always, we'll also feature a couple UCM alumni, we'll look back at This Week in UCM Athletics History, and we'll look ahead to what is coming up the next seven days.

Remember, you can listen live or on your own time.  Sports Page airs every Thursday and Saturday at 6 p.m. on UCM-The Beat, the university's internet radio station.  You can listen at ucmbeat.com or download the app for Android. OR you can subscribe to the podcast for Apple, Spotify or Anchor.

And the answer to this week's trivia question:  Jennies softball has had two NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship recipients.  Who are they and in what years were they honored?

The first was current Jennies head coach Susan (Punzo) Anderson.  She won the award in 1997.  And in 2014, Alex Groeger was honored.