Well we weren't sure how these new Minor formats were going to work out, but it is clear now that they are going great so far! We had our biggest turn out so far for a one day event with 93 total entries! The event had 62 qualifying entries and 31 economy parlay entries, 22 cashers, a 1 in 4.2 cash ratio and paid out over $4,000.00 in main and side event prizes. The incredible turn out allowed us to pay FAR MORE then our advertised guaranteed payouts. We were able to payout $1,000 for first instead of $600, $600 for 2nd instead of $300 and $300 for third instead of $200. We also increased the semi-finalist payouts from $160 to $175 and all of the quarter finalists went up $25. We can't thank all of the members enough for their incredible support over the years. We were suprised the very first time we got over 90 entries for 6 squads, and today we were able to accompish that with only 3 squads.
This was also the first time that the players competed on the 32ft PBA Wolf oil pattern. This is the shortest PBA pattern, and the shortest pattern that we have ever bowled on. The fresh proved to be very difficult for just about everyone. While they could have a good game or two, the incredibly fast transistion that the pattern offered in the first three games restricted practically everyone from having 3 consistent games on fresh conditions. However, the opposite insued on the final squad of the day. The transistion had finally slowed down, the oil had carried down lane a little bit and really allowed the players to put some scores together. The strong majority of quartefinalists came from the final squad of the day.
As always we like to welcome the new bowlers to the SFT AHT family that came out the event this weekend. Eddie Elsarelli and Vera Sjoberg made their SFT AHT debuts this weekend and we hope they had a good time! Also congrats to Joe Sabye on advancing to the quarter finals after a long drought, and also to Kyle Duster who advanced to his first ever quarter finals at this event.
The quarter finals had very low scoring, very simiar to the first squad of the day. This allowed for a lot of moving around through out the three games. It resulted in the following bowlers being the semi-finalits. The A division had #1 seed Kyle Duster taking on #2 seed Jakob Butturff, B Division #1 seed Zack Huglin vs #2 seed Shawna Strause, C Division #1 seed Ryan Wright vs #2 seed Tim Coogler. Each match had a David vs Goliath kind of feel. Jakob and Tim were both coming off previous semi-final match appearances and were clearly on fire, while Zack has multiple SFT AHT titles on short patterns with a lot of well known success on short patterns. While, they all seemed to be the favorites, they all lost. Jakob needed a strike in the 10th to defeat Kyle and a 7 pin stopped him, Zack had his worse game of the tournament at the wrong time, and Tim had a knock-out, drag-out with Ryan that was only decided by a handful of pins.
The final match wasn't nearly as exciting as some of our others. Atleast not when determing the winner. Kyle Duster started off with the first three strikes, and made some clutch spares in the middle of the game to keep his lead. Shawna and Ryan were never able to get enough going to put any pressure on Kyle when Kyle stopped striking. This also helped Kyle finally get back to being comfortable and he was able to throw another string to finish the match and take home his very first SFT AHT title, $1,000.00 and the BIG CHECK! Shawna was able to sneak out 2nd place thanks to an open in the 10th frame by Ryan due to an unfortunate break in leaving the 7-8 split.
Thanks again to everyone for making the event such a success and we look forward to seeing you at Brunswick Zone Mesa on 3/8/2015!
