At Fresno State, the mainstream sports are traditionally football, women’s basketball, baseball and softball but another sport on campus has won a national championship.
The men’s club bowling team won their first national championship in program history after defeating Webber International on April 24. In the semifinals, they defeated Wichita State who had won the past three national championships in bowling.
This was the first national championship at Fresno State since the baseball team captured the College World Series in 2008.
For one person who has been close to the program, it has come around full circle.
“For me personally, it’s probably a little different than the boys,” head coach Chris Preble said. “It was a huge relief to some degree getting involved with the program for the better part of 20 years. I was a player for the program. I’ve been coaching now for 10 years with the university. We’ve come very close in the past so it was a great sense of satisfaction and a huge relief that we actually got it done. It was a very cool moment.”
During their run to the championship, they faced some adversity, especially, after they got behind three games to one in their match against Wichita State. They couldn’t lose again or they would be eliminated. And they would not lose again as they beat the Shockers four straight times.
“It’s almost a perfect storm of things that happened for us,” Preble said. “Beating Wichita State who were the three-time national champions in the semifinal match was tough. We had to beat them twice. You couldn’t have scripted that out any better. Obviously, there’s some prestige with just beating them. A lot of teams get intimidated by the fact that they’re playing against them. They’re essentially the Duke of college bowling to some degree. So getting around them was a huge boost.”
The team would go on to play Webber International where they would win the best of seven series before they even reached the 10th frame. This was a big deal since Webber International was the top-ranked team in country.
“The team that we challenged in the final was Webber International and they were ranked No. 1 in the nation going into that match,” Preble said. “I have a lot of respect for their program. They’re a new program but their coach is very good so we were very thrilled to get around both of those teams.”
With the win in the bag by the 10th frame, anchor bowler Greg Geering didn’t have any pressure on the final frame. He ended up throwing a strike anyway.
“I was really fortunate that I didn’t really have to do much work in the 10th frame,” Geering said. “As a team, we were really fortunate that it was almost locked up. All I needed to do was get a strike or spare, and we were going to be good.”
Geering is the anchor bowler on the team that consists of five total bowlers that actually compete.
He was the runner-up player of the year and also a first-team All-American after he helped bring the national championship to Fresno State, and for him, this has been a long time coming.
“It’s an incredible feeling,” Geering said. “It’s something you grow up dreaming about through junior bowling and through high school bowling. And the next step at collegiate bowling. It’s a dream come true and a great honor to do it here at Fresno State.”
Even though, they won the championship, they had to face a lot of challenges throughout the year.
One of these challenges is the university doesn’t fund them because they are a club team which isn’t the case for most of the teams they normally play. The teams they played in the semifinals and finals are both funded.
“Pretty much all of the teams that we beat are heavily supported through the schools,” Geering said. “Looking at $250 to $500,000 a budget. They’re using that for scholarships, training and all the travel. It’s nice to be the underdogs. We operate at a much smaller level, yet we are producing an equally competitive team.”
With this team still being competitive without having a budget, coach Preble gave his goal going into next season.
“The goal in any season is to finish it like this,” Preble said. “Unfortunately, there are about 110 programs in the nation so only one of those programs goes home happy each year. We want to qualify for sectionals. We want to train these guys to the point where they’re very capable of what they can do. And then we want to go on an attack and see what kind of damage we can cause.”