Money to spare if players roll ball just right
A picture on her bedside table reminds Mabel Cummins of the first time she got a scholarship.
The amount was small, but the lesson was clear.
“I think I got like $20,” she said. “Five years ago when I just started getting into bowling in more serious tournaments, even I didn’t think that there was that much money in bowling. Once I got into it, I realized, wow there are a lot of scholarship opportunities here.”
By continuing to compete in bowling, Cummins, who is 15 and grew up in Alaska but now lives in Elburn, Ill., has upped her scholarship total to more than $25,000.
“Most people don’t expect there to be money in bowling because of the lack of publicity that it has gotten,” she said. “There’s so much money in bowling, it’s absolutely crazy, and it’s really just helping pay for my college education.”
After several years of continuous cuts in non-revenue sports at the collegiate level, bowling still offers a number of scholarship opportunities.
The largest junior bowling event in the world, the Junior Gold Championships, kicked off in Cleveland on Sunday night with the opening ceremony, and organizers expect that roughly $325,000 in scholarships will be awarded, up from about $300,000 last year.
“When you have roughly 4 to 6 million dollars coming into a scholarship program and then being paid out to schools on a yearly basis, it’s certainly a very positive marketing tactic to kids,” said Chad Murphy, executive director of the United States Bowling Congress (USBC).
More than 4,000 bowlers, ages 7 to 20, are competing in the event that runs through July 22. The top male and female bowlers in each age bracket will be awarded scholarships, which go into their SMART account.
The Scholarship Management and Account Reporting for Tenpins (SMART) is an independent entity that helps young bowlers manage and protect their scholarships. It works similar to a bank account: When athletes are awarded scholarships, they deposit them into their SMART account. Then when they are heading off to college, they can transfer winnings out.
“A parent might choose bowling over something else because of the competitions and hope its financial value will inevitably offset the college tuition payments,” Murphy said.
Individual schools offer scholarships as well. According to the USBC, there were 77 women’s bowling teams in the NCAA for 2016-17. Men’s and women’s bowling is also contested in the NAIA, but there are not yet enough schools to hold a national championship.
Some athletes, such as Jeffery Mann, who won the Under-20 male division at Junior Gold last year, use a combination of school scholarships and their SMART account savings to pay for college.
Mann, who is from West Lafayette, Ind., has accumulated many scholarships over the years, winning the first one when he was only 5 or 6. In the fall, he will head to Marian University in Indianapolis, where he will compete on the bowling team.
“As someone that wasn’t really gifted with academics, it gave me hope. As in I had a chance to attend college, to get an education and be able to make a career,” said Mann, a member of Junior Team USA, which is a group of elite athletes that represent the USA in international competitions.
He saw bowling benefit him in other ways as well.
“For me, it helped me develop time management and organizational skills, because I had to balance school and bowling,” he said.
Even if a bowler decides not to compete in college, he or she can access the awards in his or her SMART account.
“Most of these kids won’t bowl in college,” Murphy said. “But they’ll still be using those SMART funds to pay for tuition and books, to become doctors, lawyers and whatever else they chose to be. That’s a cool part.”
Mann and Cummins both look to build their scholarship funds when they return to the Junior Gold Championships. Cummins won the U15 division last year. While they focus first on defending their titles, Murphy knows the scholarships still matter.
“Sometimes these kids at the highest level, they won’t know that or necessarily appreciate that, because for the most part, they’re there to compete at this time. But then when they get on that college campus, they recognize the importance of it,” he said.
“The costs of college are exploding, so any way we can help our athletes do that, that’s certainly important.”