State struggles

COLUMBUS, Ohio — After graduating only one starter from the team came up just 13 pins short of the top eight teams at state a year ago, the Indians had high hopes heading into the state tournament.

The Tribe looked poised to crack the top eight this season, as it put up the third-highest total among the state qualifiers at the district level.

But a rough start to the day set the Indians back, and they never managed to recover, once again leaving them out of the finals.

Fort Recovery High School’s girls bowling team finished 12th at the OHSAA Division II State tournament at H.P. Lanes on Friday, only managing 3,268 pins.

At the state tournament, teams had five bowlers roll three individual games before throwing five Baker games. The top eight teams were then seeded into a bracket, where they would bowl a best-of-five Baker games to advance.

Fort Recovery rolled a 3,824 at the Southwest district tournament, which only got beat out by Versailles (3,849) and Napoleon (3,844). Both the Indians and Versailles — the Tigers shot a 3,370 — got left out of the top eight as Mechanicsburg claimed the final spot with 3,404, which was 136 pins ahead of the Tribe.

“It was very disappointing,” said FRHS coach Alison Rosegrant. “We are a better team than what we showed today. The hardest part of this is, coming in we were third place in terms of numbers, we expected a lot better performance and just didn’t show up today.”

Fort Recovery got off to a rocky start as the five individuals combined for 832 pins, which sat 11th of the 16 teams.

Deanna Brown put up the best game of 194, which was the Tribe’s high for the day. She rolled four strikes and filled five of the other six frames except for a 6-7-10 split in the second. Emily Lauber’s 171 was the second best game. Despite leaving the first four frames open with three splits, she found a way to come back with five strikes over the final four frames, including four in a row.

FRHS also got games of 159, 156 and 152 from Kayla Heitkamp, Ella Schoen and Lilah Thien, respectively.

“I think we just had a hard time finding our groove and knocking down pins,” said Heitkamp. “We had some weird splits and (the breaks) weren't in our favor today.”

Things didn’t get much better in the second and third individual games. Schoen led the second batch of games with a 190 powered by a turkey from the fourth frame to the sixth. Brown followed with a 185 with only one open frame (a chopped 4-7 in the fifth). Heitkamp finished with a hambone for a 174 and Thien had a 165. Lauber bowled the first six frames before freshman Jadyn Wyerick took over in the seventh, combining for a 129.

Brown’s third game again led FRHS, as the sophomore filled nine frames for a 192. Schoen followed with 182 pins. Heitkamp and Thien finished one pin apart with games of 156 and 155, respectively. Wyerick again finished the final four frames of a game as Saidy DeRoo rolled the first six, to total 153 pins.

In all, Brown led Fort Recovery with a 571 series, which tied with Brianna Carter of Westfall for 20th. She missed all-state recognition by 20 pins as Bryan’s Haylie Federspiel took the final spot. (The top five bowlers made the first team All-State, sixth through 10th were second team and 11th through 15th were honorable mentions.) Schoen finished 39th with a 528, Heitkamp’s 489 was good for 60th and Thien finished 72nd with a 472.

The Indians struggled to find consistency, as different bowlers struggled with their ball coming up light, others were heavy and nearly all of them had pin action that left splits and difficult fills. Even solid hits didn’t always turn out as the Tribe had eight ringing 10s (or ringing 7s for Brown, who is a lefty).

“We definitely struggled with the mental game, which is probably the first time this year we’ve had this much of a problem with staying positive,” Rosegrant said, while commending Schoen for trying her best to inject energy into the group. “We had a lot of really good strike balls that didn’t turn into strikes. Had a lot of close spares that should have been (converted).

“I think that brought the team down and we couldn’t get out of the funk once we were in it.”

Despite the struggles during the individual games, FRHS only sat 49 pins out of eighth place. The Tribe couldn’t make up the ground as it couldn’t break 170, rolling games of 168, 129, 141, 156 and 161.

Fourth-seeded Urbana claimed the Division II crown, beating the No. 6 seed Harding in the final. Napoleon’s Arianna Kiessling earned the individual state title with games of 198, 248 and 257 for a 703-pin series.

As a team, Fort Recovery only filled 135 out of 200 frames (67.5%) and finished with a 37.4% strike percentage (82-of-219).

Four of the Indians bowled donned the Indians’ logo for the final time as DeRoo, Heitkamp, Lauber and Schoen are all set to graduate. While they didn’t manage to crack the top eight, the quartet led the Indians to their only state appearances as a team in back-to-back seasons.

“I think it was a great senior season,” Heitkamp said. “Us seniors really pulled it together and it was awesome to come back to state again this year.”