Clark County has been a hotbed for high school girls bowling for several years now.
The county has had several individual state bowling champions and a similar number of championship teams over recent years.
Most recently, the Evergreen girls bowling team won the 3A state team championship last February. Evergreen’s Kerissa Andersen became the last Clark County individual state champion.
Well, Andersen and Evergreen are still rolling in 2018. That was evident in their match Friday against Kelso at Triangle Lanes.
To understand it properly, you first have to understand what makes a good dual-match score. Normally, a winning team in a match posts a score of about 1,700. A score over 2,000 is really, really good.
Kelso posted a score of 2,020 against Evergreen on Friday, and Kelso lost the match by almost 300 pins.
When we first saw Evergreen’s score of 2,302, we thought “Is that right?” Then we noticed some of Evergreen’s individual scores.
Lexi Henderson had a 211 game. Jessica Dufrain had games of 205 and 234. And then there was Andersen, who bowled a 203 and a 266.
A score of 266 is only very good, but very, very close to a perfect score.
A perfect 300 involves rolling 12 strikes. To score a 266, you generally have to bowl at least 10 strikes.
But just as impressive as Andersen’s 266 was Evergreen’s baker game of 238.
A baker game involves each member of the five-bowler team rolling two frames each. To post a good score, it involves one bowler building off the success of another. One open frame can bring the score down.
But the Evergreen team was rolling to get a 238. Its other baker game was a very solid 198.
Put that all together, you get 2,302.
All of the information can be derived by looking at the high school scoreboard in Saturday’s Columbian. The High School Scoreboard is the 6.5-point type in the print edition with all of the previous days results.
And we get all of those results from coaches calling, posting or emailing them to us. There are stories in those results, which is why they are so important.
Here are some other stories in the results you may have missed this past week.
- On Wednesday, Union and Skyview held the first girls dual match ever in the 4A Greater St. Helens League. Since the inception of girls wrestling as a sanction sport in the WIAA, girls competitions have been limited to weekend tournaments because most girls teams have enough depth to fill out a full dual meet roster. To find two teams with large enough rosters to face off in a dual meet is even more rare. But Union and Skyview accomplished the feat last Wednesday, with 23 wrestlers facing off. Union picked up the victory 57-18. In that match, Skyview’s Hikaru Abe scored a pin in 30 seconds. It was her second match of the day. Abe participated in the boys match held before the girls match, and lost 7-6 at 106 pounds.
- Speaking of girls wrestling, Kelso hosted a huge girls wrestling tournament on Saturday, bringing in more than 80 teams and 600 wrestlers. Allison Blaine of Hudson’s Bay and Krista Warren of Union were two Clark County entries who captured titles at the Kelso Girls Invitational, Blaine winning at 135-pounds and Warren at 140. Warren helped Union place second overall in the team standings.
- Also Saturday, two of the top gymnastics teams faced off when Camas and Columbia River competed in a meet at Naydenov with Skyview and Evergreen. Camas posted another solid effort with a score of 177.575, led by wins on bars by Alyssa Shibata and on beam by Shae McGee. Columbia River was second (165.38) led by wins on the vault by Sarah Ellis and floor by Grace Gordon. Ellis won the all-around with 36.85, just ahead of Gordon (36.8).
- We had one boys swimming meet reported to us this week, and it showed that Columbia River is primed for another big season. Josh Bottelberghe posted 2A state-qualifying times in the 200 freestyle and 100 breaststroke, Rob Mead did the same in the 100 freestyle and 100 backstroke, as did Sam Walker in the 500 freestyle.
All of these highlights we were able to share with you because of the efforts of coaches getting the results to us, by either calling, emailing or posting to sites like trackwrestling.com, which has been a godsend for reporting weekend tournament results.
The Columbian can’t be everywhere. But when coaches take the effort of sharing their results with us, we can share them with everyone.
And we appreciate those who make the effort to make sure the outstanding athletes in our area get the attention they should.
Tim Martinez is the assistant sports editor/prep editor for The Columbian. He can be reached at 360-735-4538, tim.martinez@columbian.com or on Twitter @360TMart.
