The bowling team has been doing well in the first round. We came into the final week, the position round, in second place and down just three points. We’d be playing the first place team, so we had an excellent chance to finish the round in first. With seven points possible per night (two per game and one for total pin count), we needed just 5 to force an extra game or make the playoffs straight away.

Unfortunately, we had trouble fielding a full team. One regular was already traveling for work when another got asked to go a on a short notice trip as well. None of our subs were available and our roster is technically full. We really didn’t have any good options to field a full team, so we bowled with four. That means the fifth man automatically gets a calculated score of his average minus ten pins.

The whole night was pretty frustrating. Bowling without a full team seems to throw everything off just enough that nothing goes quite as you’d like it. We lost the first game by a wide margin – 94 pins. But we came back and took a commanding lead in game two (over 100 pins at times), only to watch it slip. We still won by 28 pins, but we didn’t make up as much of the differential as we would have liked. We also won game three, but only by 41 which wasn’t enough to get us into an extra game. We fell 25 pins short even though we won two games out of three. That slim a margin over three games…so close.