(gentle music) (gentle music) -[Erin] I don't know who I would be or what I would do without the sport of bowling.

It's brought me my best friends in life.

It's taught me resilience.

It's taught me work ethic doesn't define me, but it's a huge, a huge piece of who I am.

It changed my life.

-[Announcer] A little bit.

They know they have to have it.

-[Announcer 2] To the victor go the spoils.

The Nebraska Cornhuskers are your 2021 champions.

-[Karla] My life is what it is because of bowling.

I came to Nebraska because of bowling.

I stayed in Nebraska, built a life here in Lincoln and the reason I came to Nebraska was to bowl for Nebraska.

So it set the stage for the whole trajectory of my life.

(gentle music) -[Narrator] In the center of the country, bowling has deep roots.

Nebraska's kingpin culture has been passed down for generations.

-[Karla] I was one of those bowling kids who just grew up in the bowling alley I would go with on Saturday mornings with my brother and I won City Tournament my first year and was like, this is winning's fun.

(gentle music) So I stuck with it and the rest was history.

-[Erin] My parents bowled like a Saturday night fun league, so they let me throw a ball occasionally when they were done.

But I rolled my first league when I was probably 5 or 6.

-[Narrator] From that young age, Erin McCarthy followed her path down the lane to professional bowling.

(gentle music) In 2015, the Professional Women's Bowling Association relaunched.

That allowed herself and others like her to chase their dreams.

(gentle music) -[Erin] Everyone was super excited, especially some of the women who were on the old tour where it just ceased operations and they had no idea what they were going to do.

So special in many different ways.

-[Bill] There's a whole lot more female bowling on television, especially on ESPN, than there used to be.

You're sitting with your daughter and watch people bowl.

I want do that, dad.

That's.

I think it's a biggest plus is the advertising applied by television channels.

-[Erin] We're going to bigger centers, more exposure.

The women that are bowling in college now now have something to look forward to, which is not something that we had, you know, 2010, 2011, and so on and so forth.

(gentle music) -[Narrator] Women's bowling is as popular as ever in Nebraska.

That popularity began in Omaha in 1924.

The Ladies Greater Omaha Bowling League became one of the first women's leagues in the United States.

(upbeat music) -[Sharon] The women had dress code, and if you didn't qualify to go on the lanes looking the way you did, there was a room over there's with clothes and you will go change your clothes and when you come out, you better be presentable.

(upbeat music) -[Narrator] In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Omaha was the Mecca of bowling across the country with nearly 500 lanes at 25 different alleys.

-[Sharon] Per capita, we had the most bowling lanes in existence.

That was one of the only things we had to do.

(upbeat music) I mean, you didn't have soccer and all the other activities that they've got going for them now.

(upbeat music) -[Narrator] Today, the game has evolved, challenging players more than ever.

(upbeat music) -[Paul] The game has become very technical and very physics based, so you have to really keep up with the equipment.

Being creative with your lane play, all that stuff is just very important these days.

-[Karla] The bowling equipment has gotten so much better.

The the level of diversity that you can have in your arsenal of bowling balls is so much different than it used to be.

-[Bill] It used to be that each girl would be having two, two ball bags weighing 15 pounds.

You're carrying around 60 pounds.

Well, now there are three ball bags and there's more of them.

-[Karla] The level of of being able to analyze what happened in a shot, both from the movement of the player and the movement of the ball, the way the pins reacted.

There's so much more that they can look at to see what happened and figure out why it happened.

(upbeat music) -[Narrator] While the popularity dimmed on the sport after Omaha's heyday, it's seen a resurgence.

(upbeat music) The 11 time national champion Nebraska women's bowling team leads the way in showcasing the sport in the state.

-[Paul] When Bill Straub took over in the early 80s and started to help coaching the club, people started getting better.

And then once people started getting better, they started to get a little bit of success.

And once you get a little bit of success, then you start attracting more recruits and you start to get the reputation that if you go there, the coach makes you better and you have a chance to win.

-[Bill] The guy who hired me, this is Bill Byrne, was the A.D.

at the time, and he wanted to win.

It used to be called the Honda Trophy, and he saw bowling had been having some success.

So he called me into his office and said, we want to try to pick you up on the program.

-[Paul] We set the bar in the standard years ago, even before the NCAA, when we were a club.

-[Karla] My first two years on the team were like pre NCAA when we were still developing sport.

And then my final two years were when we were established as an NCAA sport.

An immediate change for us was when we were pre NCAA, we would go to tournaments that were NCAA teams and club teams, and it would be tournaments where the men's club teams were bowling on one side of the house and the women's club teams were bowling on the other side of the house.

And when we went NCAA, we were only going to NCAA tournaments at that point.

- Since the NCAA movement and now being part of athletics, we have set the standard for what it looks like to be a top bowling program.

So a lot of the schools today that are very successful and are winning championships have modeled themselves after what we do and what we've done for decades.

Several of the coaches that we compete against are members of our men's bowling club from years ago.

We are pumping out people that have gone on to coach and have taken our philosophy and our foundation into their program and are now winning championships, doing so.

(people chatting) -[Narrator] For Erin, the opportunity to bowl collegiately, first at Nebraska and then at Midland University, allowed her her to carry on her passion.

That passion would lead her to be named the MVP at the 2012 Intercollegiate Team Championships.

-[Erin] It really set the bar as to what I could do with bowling later in life.

-[Narrator] With the reformation of the PWBA in 2015, Erin battled through practices and tournaments before her first win in 2018 at the Louisville Open.

-[Erin] I had been so close so many different times, but had never really broken through in that moment was completely validating for me.

I think I just went into the final match with a different mindset, which ultimately led to my first title.

That's a feeling that I don't think I'll ever forget.

-[Announcer] Erin McCarthy.

(crowd clapping and cheering) A full time nurse.

(crowd clapping and cheering) -[Erin] The US Open is a top prize.

Everyone dreams of winning that type of event, but very few people actually get there.

I think it was even more rewarding just because that season was pretty mediocre in comparison to some of my prior ones.

I was actually in dead last after two games.

I was -99, and at the US Open.

That seems like an impossible feat to climb out of that hole.

And the fact that I was able to do that and then run the ladder and end up on top, um, it's something that I'll cherish for forever.

I'm not sure that it will ever fully sink in that I have a US Open title.

-[Announcer] Congratulations.

The US Open champion.

(crowd clapping) -[Erin] Thank you so much.

It's so small, but so big at the same time.

It's,everyone knows everyone.

Um, so even if you, you know, you meet someone at a random tournament, chances are you're going to run into them again at a future tournament or league.

People that I know here in Omaha, bowling wise, I've known them for anywhere from 10 to 25 plus years, just whether it was in middle school, high school bowling, or in the adult aspect.

Um, we're just one big group, essentially.

(upbeat music) -[Narrator] As the sport continues its growth in Nebraska.

Play at the high school level has led to a rise of more in-state bowling talent.

-[Paul] I'd like to think, you know, Nationwide and Nebraska.

I think the better the coaching gets, I think the better the future is.

You're seeing not only are we recruiting in the state, so are other programs.

-[Karla] Bowling is a big sport at the high school level in Nebraska.

Um, girls in Nebraska, I think for a long time strove to bowl for Nebraska and now have so many more opportunities.

-[Paul] There's a few girls that are bowling at different programs around the country that came from Nebraska.

So the talent level is definitely getting better in Nebraska in recent years.

So I'd like to think that leads towards a bright future.

-[Erin] I love the competition.

I love the hard days on the lanes just as much as I love the good days on the lanes.

I think it again, it all wraps back around to life lessons and resilience.

Anything is possible.

You know, if you if you set your mind to do something, you can achieve it.

(gentle music)