Kats depart for MoTown and NCAA
4/12/2011 11:42:00 AM | Women's Bowling
With a crowd of fans cheering them on, the inaugural Sam Houston women's bowling team boarded their bus Tuesday morning to head to Houston Intercontinental and a jet to Detroit and the NCAA Championships.
Sam Houston's University Police Department gave the team bus a police escort out of Huntsville. The Bearkats are one of eight teams in the championships. The three-day event will be be hosted by the University of Detroit Mercy and the Detroit Metro Sports Commission on April 14-16 at the Skore Lanes in Taylor, Michigan. The Kat bowlers are the only first-year NCAA Division I women's bowling team to earn NCAA selection in the eight-year history of the championship.
The Bearkats will join defending national champion Fairleigh Dickinson, Arkansas State, Central Missouri, Kutztown, Maryland-Eastern Shore, Nebraska and Vanderbilt in the field. Rounds 1 through 4 will be webcast live on www.NCAA.com . Saturday's finals will be televised nationally on a delayed basis on ESPN. The telecast will air Sunday afternoon April 17 at 1:30 p.m. Huntsville time.
Members of the team headed to Michigan are freshmen Neishka Cardona from Carolina Puerto Rico; Kimi Davidson from Azle, Texas and Shaina Woolbaugh from Kirkwood, NY, and juniors Dayna Galganski from West Palm Beach, Fla,; Lisa MacAllister from Kemp, Tex. And Aida Sanchez from the Domincan Republic.
NCAA competition begins with qualifying rounds in which each team will bowl one five-person regular team game against each of the other seven teams participating in the championship for a total of seven games. Teams will be seeded for bracket play based on their win-loss record during the qualifying rounds.
Teams will then compete in best-of-seven-games Baker matches in a double-elimination tournament. In the Baker format, each of the five team members, in order, bowls a complete frame until a complete (10-frame) game is bowled. A Baker match tied 3½ games to 3½ games after seven games will be decided by a tiebreaker using the Modified Baker format.
As the Bearkats departed campus, the National Tenpins Coaches Association released their April, 2011 national rankings. Again, as they have since the first regular season poll last fall, Sam Houston is in the top 10. The new rankings are:
|
Rank |
Team |
Won |
Lost |
Points |
|
1 |
Fairleigh Dickinson |
103 |
19 |
672 |
|
2 |
Maryland Eastern Shore |
98 |
30 |
577 |
|
3 |
Central Missouri |
66 |
27 |
567 |
|
4 |
Nebraska |
65 |
19 |
529 |
|
5 |
Vanderbilt |
81 |
39 |
509 |
|
6 |
Kutztown |
97 |
33 |
405 |
|
7 |
Arkansas State |
61 |
26 |
389 |
|
8 |
Sacred Heart |
75 |
38 |
341 |
|
9 |
New Jersey City |
84 |
35 |
337 |
|
10 |
Sam Houston |
68 |
35 |
311 |
|
11 |
Adelphi |
81 |
58 |
228 |
|
12 |
Stephen F. Austin |
56 |
40 |
165 |
|
13 |
Wisconsin-Whitewater |
34 |
24 |
137 |
|
14 |
Delaware State |
65 |
49 |
126 |
|
15 |
Saint Francis (NY) |
72 |
56 |
125 |
|
16 |
Valparaiso |
52 |
48 |
124 |
|
17 |
Alabama A&M |
59 |
35 |
111 |
|
18 |
Norfolk State |
67 |
49 |
73 |
|
19 |
Minnesota State |
33 |
42 |
33 |
|
20 |
Fayetteville State |
72 |
13 |
20 |
