198!!!

Yup – you read that correctly.  On the last night of bowling for the season I bowled a 198!!!  I am still working on the consistency piece, but I bowled 95, 198, & 161 on Friday night which gave me 7^th overall for the ladies for the night.  In my defense, the first game was bowled on lanes 5-6 which are the worst lanes in the alley.  The oil is so awful on those lanes that my normally sharp curve ball rolled straight that whole game and I couldn’t get it figured out.  Lanes 1-2 (where we bowled the 2^nd game) and Lanes 3-4 (3^rd game) are much easier on my curve ball so I felt like I was back to normal.  If I would have had just 10 more  pins throughout the night, I would have finished in the top 5 and won money.  Oh well, it gives me something to look forward to to next season J

March Madness

I will be the first to admit that I don’t follow college basketball until the NCAA Tournament.  Don’t get me wrong, I love watching basketball and know a lot about the sport after watching my brothers play for years and kept book for Tom’s traveling team, but I just don’t enjoy watching it on tv as much as I do in person.  Once March comes along though, I really enjoy watching the tournament.  It usually amounts to a lot of good close games, some epic upsets (sorry to see that was Duke this year), and some fun excitement (or not) seeing how my bracket picks are doing.

In the past years, my brackets have been pretty terrible.  By the end of day one I am usually out of the mix already because as I said before, I don’t follow the teams during the regular season.  I usually base my picks on rankings, throw a few upsets in there if I like the teams/schools and hope I do well.  This year, after day 1 I had picked 16 of 16 games correctly.  HOW AWESOME IS THAT! My husband was dumbfounded after seeing how well I was doing and seeing how *cough* terrible he was doing.  The one game I remember him asking me about was Colorado vs University of Nevada Las Vegas.

Chris: “Why did you pick Colorado over UNLV?”

Me: “I’ve visited the University of Colorado.  It’s a pretty campus and I really liked the school so I picked them.”

Chris: “Seriously!  You have been to Las Vegas too.  Why didn’t you pick them?”

Me: “Because I haven’t been to the school campus and I really liked Colorado” hehe!

I’m not normally the girl that picks sports wins based on team colors, mascots, etc but I had to pick some upsets and in that particular game I chose based on the school campus.  Not the best strategy, but I did end up picking the right team and was certainly doing better than he was on his bracket.

I had some ups and downs through the rest of the tournament, but ended up picking the championship game teams and winner correctly to finish out in 3^rd place out of 109 brackets in my brother’s league.  Pretty good for not watching during the season!

As I mentioned earlier, I much prefer to watch games in person than on tv.  This year, we were lucky enough to have Sweet 16 and Elite 8 games in St Louis.  Chris and I finally had a weekend off from bowling for the first time in months so we decided to pick up tickets and go to the games.  I got to see my favorite team, the Kansas Jayhawks win both of their games last weekend and suffered through watching UNC win one game before Kansas pulled out the win against them on Sunday. Note: Duke is my second favorite team so I always cheer against UNC.  It was pretty cool to see three tournament games in person.  Having only been to one Minnesota Gophers game in my life (which I wouldn’t count as good Division 1 basketball), this was by far the best D1 games I have seen in person.

Although I HATE to play sports as a result of my complete lack of coordination, I love to watch and know much more about sports than the average girl.  This sports year is looking to be a little daunting for my teams (MN Twins and Indianapolis Colts) I will continue to cheer for them in hopes that they can each pull out a decent season.  My husband is lucky to be married to me with the amount of sports we watch together J