Women's bowling captures second in OBC

The Muskingum women's bowling team was back in action on Saturday, February 7, in Columbus at the Columbus Square Bowling Palace for OBC #4.

Prior to the start of the tournament, the conference award winners were announced, with junior Tayler Clark earning First Team All-Conference and senior Lillian Matteson earning Second Team All-Conference honors.

Sophomore Faith Smith earned the high game within the conference with a 246 at OBC #3.

This tournament is designed to replicate a single day of the ITC Sectionals, the first postseason tournament. The format is 32 baker games broken up into 8 sets of 4 games.

The Muskies started out strong and sat in third place after the first set of games with a 668 for four games, trailing by roughly 150 pins. During the second set the Muskies started with a 203 before finishing up with a 730 for the four games.

The Muskies maintained third place after the third set, which added 709 to the total and kept pace with the leaders despite being roughly 200 pins back.

Muskingum set a new program record in the fourth set with an 838 total with games of 255, 201, 158 and 224. With the record-breaking set, the Muskies were able to gain some ground on Rio who led the tournament throughout the day.

That set was followed up by a 759 for the fifth set and 730 for the sixth set to extend the gap over fourth place.

After a rough seventh set of 663 pins, the Muskies looked to bounce back and tighten their grasp on third place in the tournament. The team battled and bounced back with a final set of 747 to solidify themselves in third place, 50 pins of Ohio State.

Despite the Muskies' fight and grit throughout the rest of the tournament, they just couldn't gain any ground on the eventual winners from Rio Grande. The Muskies totaled 5844 pins, and Rio Grande tallied 6204 on the day.

The Muskies will close out the regular season in Indianapolis at the Hoosier Classic this weekend, February 14-15.