SPORTS BOWLING
Darrow Montgomery
Jayla Webster
Up Their Alley Howard University’s women’s bowling team wants people to know it exists and it’s here to win. By Kelyn Soong @KelynSoong In the decade and a half Ron Davis has spent coaching the Howard University women’s bowling team, he’s never led a group quite like the one he did last winter. The Bison won a program-best 50 matches and qualified for the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference tournament for the second straight year. The players spoke excitedly about the chance to bowl for the title to cap off their historic season. Then, shortly before the team was set to leave for the MEAC championships in Chesapeake, Virginia, in late March, the conference suspended its basketball and bowling
tournaments and spring sports season due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Don’t ask Davis about the disappointment he felt. It still stings. “After you hang up the phone, I’m probably going to knock the wall down or something,” he says with a laugh. “I knew that this team was going in the direction where we could compete in the championship.” Howard women’s varsity bowling, which has never won the MEAC championship in the 20 years the tournament has been held, will have to wait a little longer before it gets another chance. In November, the school’s athletic department decided to opt out of the 2020-21 season, a call the school “made with
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the health and safety of our student-athletes being our top priority,” a Howard athletics department spokesperson says. The bowlers are eager to return, but beyond that, they want respect. They want the recognition that comes with being a Division I collegiate athlete. These women practice daily, yet some classmates are still surprised to learn Howard even has a varsity bowling team. Awareness in the greater D.C. community is even fainter. Davis intends for that to change. “We put in the time,” he says. “We’re serious about what we do.” Ronald Davis Jr. is the first to arrive.
It’s a little after 4 p.m. on March 2, 2020, and I am at AMF Capital Plaza Lanes in Hyattsville to report on the team for a cover story that would eventually be scrapped due to the pandemic. Davis, who is Ron’s son and the team’s volunteer assistant coach, and I wait near the far left corner of the building as Ron, five of the team’s six players, and their team manager enter the facility one at a time. Since the Howard women’s bowling team does not have its own facility on campus, the players have to commute from D.C. to either Hyattsville or the bowling center at Joint Base Andrews four times a week for practice. There used to be a 12-lane bowling alley at the Armour J. Blackburn University Center on campus, but the lanes have been shut down for renovations since the 2016-17 academic year. “It’s frustrating,” says captain Carolyn Williams. “Seeing the improvements the athletic department is making in other areas, it’s really rewarding ... but it is a little frustrating that the center has been down for so long.” Williams, a Glen Burnie native, comes from a bowling family. She picked up bowling around age 3 or 4 and started competing in local youth leagues shortly after. When her mother Nancy went into labor, her father and brother were at Saturday morning bowling league, Williams says. In sixth grade, she had to write about a college for a school project, and Williams’ teacher assigned her Howard University. Williams discovered during her research that the school has its own varsity women’s bowling team. She made it her goal to bowl collegiately at the HBCU. “Howard kinda stayed on my brain after that,” she says. “I did look at other places, but I knew at that moment that I wanted to compete at a DI school. I was looking within MEAC and looked at a lot of schools. Not one of them stood out to me like Howard did.” The MEAC officially sanctioned women’s bowling in 1999, and prior to the 199697 school year, the conference was the first to secure NCAA sanctioning for women’s bowling by adopting it as a club sport. There are currently 11 teams in the conference, including the three-time NCAA champion University of Maryland Eastern Shore, and a total of 87 NCAA schools have sponsored women’s bowling across the Division I, Division II, and Division III levels. All programs are eligible to compete for the NCAA Division I championship, which was first held in 2004. Howard has never competed in the NCAA championship, coming closest in 2004, when it finished as the MEAC runner-up. The tournament was scheduled to include 16 teams last year, an increase from 12 in 2019. In 2011, the Bison scored a massive upset win during the regular season over Vanderbilt University, then the No. 1 team in the country and the eventual NCAA runner-up. “In some ways, I think even with professional bowling, [the sport] is still trying to
