NU bowling places first, despite struggles

The Nebraska bowling team threw a number of strikes last weekend.

Sophomore Kristi Mickelson lost count of how many she bowled, but she knows that some of those strikes could have been better.

"I need to make sure to keep my feet slow, because I tend to run up to the foul line," Mickelson said. "If I go slower, the ball will roll better."

Even if their strikes weren't as effectively executed as they would have liked, the Husker bowlers took first place at the Morgan State Invitational last weekend, their second consecutive first-place win. Senior Cassandra Leuthold placed first with a 218 average, 19 pins higher than the second-place winner.

The team did well, Mickelson said, but they could have done better. The team had a "cushion of safety," where even though they weren't performing their best, they were still doing better than the other teams.

"There were some strikes where they should have been a split, but you would get lucky and the pins would all fall," Mickelson said. "Everyone has their little tid-bit they need to work on."

Some players struggled individually on Saturday, sophomore Danielle van der Meer said, but the team as a whole improved drastically on Sunday. At one point, the bowlers threw five strikes in a row to beat the other team.

"It was a good day to be a Husker bowler," van der Meer said.

The defending national champions will compete in two more tournaments before NCAA championship bids begin, ending the season that started with a seventh-place finish and continued with the Huskers slowly improving into the team that just won two straight tournaments.

"We struggled a lot in the beginning, but since then we have had a lot of good moments," van der Meer said.

The bowlers will continue their winning streak because of the skills they have put so much emphasis on, Mickelson said. Their scores are hard to beat because the players make it all look easy.

"We are better fundamentally," Mickelson said. "We are in control."

The team is now preparing for the Holiday Classic in Birmingham, Ala., where they hope to continue throwing strikes, but this time, make them even better.

"We're headed in a good direction," van der Meer said. "Good things are waiting for us."

paigecornwell
@dailynebraskan.com