A team of local bowlers is off to the provincial five-pin championships next month following their tournament win last weekend.
The team – Tyler Button, Aaron Arbuckle, Ben Straus, and coach Karl Jordan – won the Zone C Triples playoffs hosted by Elmira Bowl last Sunday.
The tournament consisted of three age groups – bantam (8-10), junior (11-15) and senior (16-20) – all bowling against one another in a three-game playoff scored according to “Pins-Over-Average,” or POA. Under POA rules, the bowler’s average in their league play is used as a baseline, and every pin they are over their own average is used to calculate the team’s final score.
“It’s the fairest scoring system for kids,” explained Jordan. “They just have to beat their own average. That’s why they do it that way.”
The Elmira team – whose combined average in league play was 397 – bowled 456 in the first game, 523 in the second, and 483 in the final game to win the tournament by bowling a combined 271 pins over their average.
Jordan was proud of his entire team, but bantam player Tyler Button in particular, who bowled a whopping 189 pins over his average to lead the team to victory.
“This was his first tournament, and he was awesome. He basically won it for us.”
It was Elmira Bowl’s turn to host the tournament this year and gave Jordan, the owner of the alley, the opportunity to show off his new synthetic lanes that were installed at the end of the summer. Jordan admits that his bowlers may have had a slight advantage over the other bowlers because of the new lanes.
“The other kids weren’t used to synthetic lanes, so that had a bit of an affect,” he said.
Jordan coaches the boys in their individual leagues, and says that they earned a spot on the team by winning their league roll-off’s, which also used the POA scoring system.
The tournament consisted of 12 teams from Zone C, which includes Cambridge, Elmira, Molesworth, Stratford,
Kitchener, Waterloo, New Hamburg, St. Mary’s and Mount Forest.
The team from Stratford finished second, followed by the team from Molesworth. The provincial finals are set for Jan. 23 in Brantford.
