My writing: essays from beyond the lanes. Stories, lessons, and the mental game work that builds champions on the lanes and in life. A new letter when the next one's ready.
Performing on the big stage — presence, pressure, and the privilege of the moment. There’s a moment right before you bowl on the big stage. The ball feels heavier than it did in warm-up. The lights are hot. Really…
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The Tournament You Built All Year For Is Here. Now What? You walk into the building and it hits you. The banners. The lights. The hum of a thousand bowling balls rolling at once. This is the one. The tournament you…
There’s a moment after every shot when your eyes go looking for someone. You don’t always mean to do it. You throw the ball, the pins react, and before you’ve even registered the result, you’re scanning for a face.…
No one ever sat me down and explained it. I just watched. And somewhere along the way, I caught it. The lesson was never spoken out loud. It went something like this: There will be more hard days than perfect ones. But the perfect ones are built from the hard ones. And one day, every […]
There’s a man standing on the guttercap. He’s pointing at the second arrow. Not saying much. Just pointing, over and over, until my eyes finally learned to live there instead of chasing the pins forty feet away. That was Dave Ladd. My first bantam coach. Before I knew anything about angles or release or the […]
I was probably nine. The envelope had my name on it. In real handwriting. From a real, actual professional bowler. I tore it open and there she was. Jeanne Maiden. Signed photo. To me. I stared at it like it was a relic. A woman I had only ever seen on television had taken the […]
Ten years of fire in my knees. Every step down the approach. Every frame. Every tournament where I smiled for photos while my body screamed. I gritted my teeth and played through it anyway. Because champions don’t quit, right? Wrong. There’s a breaking point where your body stops asking nicely. Where gritting your teeth isn’t […]
She wasn’t even five feet tall. But when she said it, you believed it. “Strong like Bull.” That was Grandma Betty. My loudest cheerleader. My best friend. The first woman who ever showed me what strength actually looked like. Before I was a world champion, I was a little girl in a bowling alley with […]
The library was quiet. Books on the shelves. A hum from the fluorescent lights. My lunch bag on the table in front of me. That’s where I ate sometimes in middle school. Not because I wanted to. Because I didn’t know where I fit in. Everyone else was grouped up. Laughing. Belonging. And I was […]