In honor of Fairleigh Dickinson becoming the first team to capture the NCAA women's bowling championship in its home state, the NJBB is unveiling a first of its own: picture time! Photo credit goes to Ben Solomon, with special thanks to Sara Naggar, FDU's Assistant Athletic Director for Athletic Communications, for forwarding it along. The Messenger has several others to thanks, as well as a notebook to clear out, so let's get to it...FIRST, the previous entry noted that the post-match buzz around Carolier Lanes was that we'd just witnessed the best NCAA final ever. Again, this being his first venture there, TM has no basis of comparison, but let's think about it in terms of sports in general: you had a juggernaut program returning to defend its championship honor (Nebraska), led by a player who is currently the greatest college bowler alive (Cassandra Leuthold); a gritty, "Hoosiers"-esque underdog playing in front of what was essentially a home crowd (FDU); and a championship series in which the teams' strikes were even at 27 apiece late in Game 6, which went to a Game 7, and which featured the winning team filling 68-of-70 frames. What equivalents does this rival — the 1985 NCAA men's basketball final between Villanova and Georgetown (where the underdog just wouldn't miss a shot)? The 1991 World Series (with the Carrillo-McEwan-Perez 3-bagger late in Game 6 playing the part of Kirby Puckett's "We'll see you tomorrow night" home run)? Heck, what about Super Bowl XLIV, where the bad break of the game went against the best player on the field? (Although it's probably not fair to compare Leuthold to Peyton Manning, especially since A) Cassie has a much better reputation of performing in the clutch, and B) Peyton won his only championship at the expense of a team with Rex Grossman as its QB).
Personally, one line I liked came from FDU head coach Mike LoPresti in the post-match press conference: "I had a conversation with [assistant coach] Lisa Friscioni, and I’m like, ‘Do you believe this match? Nobody throws opens, every time a team needs a double, they get it.’ Just the momentum swings were unlimited. And it was a fantastic match to coach."
However, the best line of the presser may have come from Nebraska coach Bill Straub, in reference to the ‘Watergate’ incident: “No pun intended with it, but if you talk about spilled water, it’s spilled milk. Did it affect the kids? Yeah. Did it affect the coaches? Yeah. Was is the change [as to] whether we were going to win or lose? That’s a big stretch… I don’t believe it had a major effect.”
So there you go... no use crying over spilled milk. I really did feel for Leuthold, but she did say she planned to continue bowling at the amateur level, and who knows? We may yet see her on TV once again some day. To The Messenger, she is quite an amazing individual — from that intense, piercing glare that may one day cause the spontaneous combustion of an unlucky pin, to her fearless and fiery desire to win, to the way she transmitted her passion for the game to her fellow Cornhuskers. TM considers it a privilege to have seen her play in person.
SECOND, as for seeing the championship match itself... well, it *eventually* made it to ESPN: The Original with a re-air on Sunday afternoon. And, although it didn't make many of the Sunday daily papers, TM did see some recaps in the news on Monday. It is a bummer that there wasn't much of said "buzz" outside of Carolier Lanes, but consider this cosmic thought that occurred to TM on Sunday:
Driving home on Saturday night, I was listening to my old pals on WFAN and realized I had forgotten just how hectic some of those weekend overnight shifts were in the world of sports talk (my last 20/20 anchor shift there was in September '08). Among the news: C.C. Sabathia making a legitimate no-hitter bid, the Mets suffering a case of the "Willies," the Devils clinching the Atlantic Division, the Tiger Woods/Masters soap opera, plus full MLB, NBA and NHL scoreboards. TM's promising young successor, Chris LoPresti (no relation to Mike) didn't even have room to squeeze in "Boston College 5, Wisconsin 0," so what chance did women's bowling have of getting a mention on The FAN?
In this case, the comparison that occurred to TM, and avid fan of "Weird Al" Yankovic, was to something Al spoke about in his long-ago aired VH1 Behind the Music episode... when his goofball comedy UHF opened in the Summer of 1989, it was playing at the same time as Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, When Harry Met Sally, Dead Poets Society and Major League. Sometimes, you just can't control what you're up against. Although, the NCAA bowling finals weren't nearly as inane as UHF, so maybe that was a bad comparison. Let's move on.
THIRD, He didn't get the chance to mention it before, but TM did bump into former Immaculate Heart standout Lauren Rhein, now a freshman at Vanderbilt, during Day 2 of the tournament last Friday... and she still may be the happiest person he has ever met. Vandy had just been eliminated by Nebraska, she didn't roll a ball in competition all weekend, and she was just excited to be playing back home, and to be with the Commodores, learning from some of the best in the business.
One other former North Jersey high school bowler that TM chatted with was FDU junior Kristen Graham from Hawthorne. Like so many other varsity competitors from up North, she met with middling success at Carolier Lanes back in the day. Saturday, she was much, much happier to be there.
AND FINALLY, the NJBB must recognize the outstanding job by New Jersey City University of hosting the tournament. Big kudos to Sports Information Director Ira Thor for supplying all the info that TM could handle and more (look at this site! They even linked the NJBB) and to Gothic Knights' head coach Frank Parisi, who managed to serve as tournament director and National Collegiate Women's Bowling Committee Chairman and, oh yeah, he led a Division III team consisting of six players to the Final Four.
One thing that I actually didn't know going in was that the tournament includes all divisions of the NCAA — 28 from D-I, 17 from D-II and 6 from D-III. TM was under the (incorrect) assumption that all schools' bowling teams were slotted into Division I, regardless of the school's division for other sports. For example, Johns Hopkins is D-III for every sport but lacrosse, where they're included in D-I. Oops.
Of course, once I knew that, the performance of the NJCU Gothic Knights — seniors Candice D'Angelo and Jenn Marmo, junior Nicole Drejerwski, sophomore Amy Brehm and sisters Jennifer (So.) and Kelly (Fr.) Daunno — seemed that much more remarkable. This team has been to the NCAA tournament in every year of its existence and has made the Final Four a total of four times! To that end, Division II Central Missouri also deserves a nod, since they've been to the championship match thrice (losing to Nebraska each time).
The concept of the little guys mixing it up with the big guys (yeah, I know we're talking girls instead of guys, just go with it) is one of the things that makes The Messenger enjoy watching sports, and by extension enjoy reporting on them. Covering this tournament certainly was a bit of a change of pace for me, considering that this is normally hibernation time for the NJBB.
I have to say, though: it was VERY worth it.
See you on the other side...
–TM
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