College bowling on the rise

The Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) named the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore's Paula Vilas the MEAC Bowling Athlete of the Week for the week ending Nov. 22.

Vilas, also a member of the Dominican Republic national team, averaged 203 by knocking down 1,015 pins in five games this past weekend at the Eastern Shore Hawk Classic. She rolled a career high 242 in a loss to Vanderbilt, the eventual tournament champion. She led her team to a third-place finish in the 19-team field, earning Most Valuable Player honors.

Oil patterns were the most difficult the NCAA allows in competition and it showed. Vilas was the only bowler in the event to total over 1,000 pins and average over 200.

She leads the UMES team into the National Team Match Games this weekend in St. Louis. The event is used to qualify for a United States Bowling Congress (USBC) sectional and from there a berth in the USBC Intercollegiate Team Championships.

Intercollegiate Team Championships

The 2010 Intercollegiate Team Championships (ITC) will be held in the El Paso Convention and Performing Arts Center in El Paso, Texas. Each spring, college bowling teams compete in regional qualifying tournaments known as "sectionals" for a chance to win the Kerm Helmer Cup at the Intercollegiate Championships in May.

The ITC tournament, sanctioned by the USBC, was first contested in 1975. The tournament has since become the culminating event of the college bowling season. The top 16 men's and top 16 women's teams in the country are invited to the ITC to compete for national titles.

For a school to participate in the ITC, it must compete in NCAA-certified college tournaments and conferences throughout the season. By either winning a conference or being one of the top-ranked teams in the country, schools advance to postseason sectional qualifying events.

ITC tournament format

The ITC now features an all-Baker system format, which consists of 32 Baker games to determine seeding in the two double-elimination brackets. A Baker format is when a team of two or more bowlers take turns bowling successive frames in a game. Thus each game score represents a team score rather than an individual score.

Teams battle through Baker format matches with the winners of each bracket meeting in a best-of-three, winner-take-all televised championship match. The top three teams in both the men's and women's divisions all receive medals, but the ultimate prize is the Helmer Cup, which is awarded to the national champions.

The award is named after the late Kerm Helmer, Erie Community College's longtime coach who passed away in 2002.

Growth spurt for collegiate bowling

The USBC projects that the 2009-10 intercollegiate bowling season will be the largest period of individual growth in history. So far this season, USBC Collegiate has added 25 new schools to its roster of institutions fielding college bowling teams.

Those additions are expected to push USBC Collegiate's total number of certified schools to 175, which would represent a 16.4-percent increase over the 152 schools that participated in 2008-09.

Gil Sanchez is a freelance bowling writer for the News & Messenger. He is a member of the Bowling Writers Association of America and the United States Bowling Congress Advisory Council. Reach him at 703-587-6792 or at gsanchez@insidenova.com.