Comets, Chickasaws take 300-game bids into 10th frames of Baker games while setting team records

By John Burbridge

sports@charlescitypress.com

CHARLES CITY — Perfect-game bids tend to sneak up on you, mainly because the perpetrator making the bid often prefers to roll in stealth.

Instead of pumping fists and prancing around like Hall of Famer Marshall Holman after stringing seven in a row, most bowlers tend to act like they’ve been there before while maintaining a stoic demeanor as they near the 10th-frame homestretch.

Even teammates and opponents check their encouragement and refrain from small-talk for fear of alerting bad luck.

When perfection is achieved, celebration is in order. But until then, the percolating excitement is tempered with trepidation as the silence between strikes gets more severe as the X-marked journey extends longer.

At least that’s how subtly perfection is birthed or near-birthed among individual bowlers.

When a 300-game bid happens during a team endeavor — like in the Baker Rotation format that serves as the latter half of high school meets — you can hear it coming as early as the first frame, like a freighttrain horn blaring from less than a quarter of a mile away, getting louder and closer by the second with the doppler effect pushing the waves together to form a thick wall of timber-toppling sound.

Though bowlers tend to keep to themselves during individual play, they emphatically rally around each other during Bakers.

You can argue that a high school or college team that scores a perfect game during Baker Rotation play has forged the ultimate amalgamation of team work and team spirit.

During Friday’s coed double-dual at Comet Bowl, the hosting Charles City boys team and the visiting New Hampton boys team both took perfect-game bids to the 10th frame during the Bakers.

In the fourth game, the Comets strung nine in a row when sophomore anchorman Noah White stepped onto the approach.

“You couldn’t ask for anyone better in a situation like that,” Charles City boys head coach Doug Bohlen said of White, whose season average (243.60) trails only Oskaloosa senior Trey VanWyk (244.17) among state leaders in all classes.

White, the Class 1A boys individual runner-up from last season who has rolled multiple 300 games in practice, came up a little light with his two-handed first-ball and left a split which went unconverted for a 266 game.

The next game, the Chickasaws made their bid. NH senior anchorman Landon Marr, a two-handed left-side roller, buried the first two in the pocket for strikes before coming up a little high on his third ball to leave a 2-count while capping the score at 298.

What clinched the meet in the Comets’ favor was White picking up his one-pin spare in the 10th frame of the fifth game and throwing a good count on his final ball for a 212 score.

That enabled the Comets to win the meet by 4 pins (3,410 to 3,406) with both teams setting team scoring records.

The previous best for the Comet boys was a 3,353 team score set during the 2019-20 season.

White led the Comets in the individual round with a 496 two-game series including a season-high 278.

Junior Jayden Lopez rolled a career-best 471 series, sophomore Joey Robel rolled a career-best 449 series, senior Keaton Ross had a 419 series, and junior Bryce Elsbury bowled a career-best 416 series that included a career-best 238 game for Charles City (4-1).

Chickasaw senior Jamison Porath led all individuals with a 503 series, and Marr had a 488 series for NH (6-2).

The Comet girls improved to 4-1 after facing an incomplete Chickasaw squad.

Two-time state-qualifier and one-time state medalist, junior Isabel Crawford, led the Comet girls with a 439 series with senior Payton Hadley (389), senior Darian Hesse (303), freshman Alexis Putney (280) and sophomore Kinleigh Bahe (264) rounding out the individual scores.

Both Comet squads will be back in action on Tuesday when they face Independence at the 319 Social House before taking on Forest City at the Super Bowl on Friday and participating in a tournament at Cadillac Lanes in Waterloo on Saturday.