After picking up a spare, sophomore Braden McAfee returned to his table and was greeted with a series of cheers and high-fives from many of his teammates.
McAfee and the unified bowling team kicked off their season with their first competition of the year Tuesday. The team was split into four subteams and each subteam bowled six games. One of the team’s subteams placed second with a series total of 622.
“I mean 622, I don’t think we have ever scored that high before,” assistant coach Ruochen Shen said.
The team will look to make its return to the state tournament after placing 14th at the event last year. Junior Rylee Griffin said she is excited to see how much the team grows throughout the season.
“I think the team has improved a lot, even from practice last week,” Griffin said. “I think the team has come together and really improved. I think if the team just keeps on practicing and keeps doing what we’re doing, we’re going to get back to state.”
Shen said he thinks having new members on the team will lead to a lot of improvement, but not just on the score sheet.
“We had a lot of people sign up this year,” Shen said. “So participation partly leads to improvement. And also, if you are here, you can see people cheer up each other and that’s a pretty good environment for the students to learn and make friends this way.”
One of the new members of the team, junior Olivia Lawhorn, said she wanted to join because she enjoys interacting and having fun with the students.
“I really wanted to do this because I’m thinking about doing this for my career,” Lawhorn said. “And so they asked me to do it and I thought it would be really fun. And I enjoy the kids, so it’s been really fun so far.”
Having fun is what it all comes down to for the team. Shen said the main reason the school has a unified bowling team is to give students with disabilities an outlet to have fun and be a part of organized sports.
“This is something they can do as a lifelong sports activity,” he said. “I think this is giving them a huge opportunity to participate in the community to bring awareness to people with disabilities so they can be treated the same as people without disabilities. They should have the same right to participate and have fun.”
The unified bowling team’s next competition is at 10 a.m. Oct. 19. The competition will take place at Royal Crest Lanes in Lawrence.
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Reach reporter Jack Denebeim at [email protected].
