We had an awesome tournament this weekend at Brunswick Tri-City lanes! We had all kinds of cool story lines that I will get into in a little bit. First off, we always start with the turn out. The event drew 105 entries, 29 cashers, had a 1 in 3.62 cash ratio, and paid out over $4,500.00 in main and side event prizefund. The exciting thing about this, is that it keeps our streak of 100 entries intact for standard events in Arizona. In 2013 we were excited to break 100 entries, and in 2014 we have yet to not break 100 entires. I am sure that the club will plateau at some point, but we sure hope that the members can keep the growth going as long as they can. We were at Brunswick Tri-City almost the same exact time of the year last year and had only 82 entries.
Lets talk about the Brunswick 40ft edge pattern that we used this weekend. In my time as tournament director, it created one of the most interesting scoring environments that I have ever seen. The pattern did exactly as it said, it forced you to play the EDGE or as close as possible to it. Since most people are comfortable with targeting right of the first arrow at the arrows, it created a very interesting scoring environment. The best way I could describe it was very feast or famine. The players who were comfortable enough with getting their feet as close to the gutter as possible got to feast. They scored huge, most of them with scores all over 720 with handicap. Then the players who tried to play "kinda" near the gutter or tried to play the middle of the lane experienced the famine. This created the oddity that I mentioned earlier, because we had HUGE scores on top, but very low cut scores. Top few bowlers were +120 or more in most cases, but the average cut score for the weekend was +59 which is actually bowling below average for most averages.
As always we like to welcome all of the new bowlers that came out to join us for their first ever SFT AHT event. Ken Love, Tim Rioux, Dave Rioux, Jesse Head, and Shonna Lavalley joined the SFT AHT family this weekend. We hoped you all had a good time in your first event with us! We also like to congratulate the Parlay Power Players. Jason Saterlee, Hokey Begay, Joe Mascio, Chuck Lucas, and Zack Huglin on turning $25 into a spot into the quarter finals! Remember that you don't have to fork out a bunch of cash to be able to win some major coin at the SFT AHT events. Only $25 could get you a $1,000.00 check.
I have to say, this weekends story lines surrounding the semi-final matches and final matches was that of a fictional movie. We had two guys with similar story lines in the fact that they recently returned to the game after taking some time off. They both have been bowling the events more and more and have gotten better and better. Most importantly, they were completely crushing the field through out the entire weekend. They both were in different divisions, but led their divisions by a bunch in qualifying and quarter finals. It was clear early on, that they were two freight trains expected to collide in the final match. Those bowlers were Jason Saterlee and Zack Huglin. Jason was the slight favorite only because of his past experience in competition and likely being able to handle the nerves a little better. Jason defeated Joe Mascio pretty easily in the A division final match with a huge 286 scratch (front 10), and Zack won a much closer match against Hokey Begay, but still with a huge score like Jason. The other finalist was Tom Large, which has proven on numerous occasions through out numerous decades to not count him out at anytime. Even more so, because Tom was the only one not bowling in his first ever SFT AHT title match.
The match started off exactly as you would expect in the fictional movie. The two freight trains were full steam ahead, both with the front 4 strikes. Zack missed first in the 5th frame, but covered the spare. Zack, B division, was getting spotted 21 pins from Jason, A division. Jason continued striking but eventually left a 7 pin in the 6th. Jason missed it to give Zack an opening. Zack couldn't capatalize leaving a split of his own. At exactly that same time, Tom Large put together a double after a clean front 6 frames. This set up for a huge nail biter finish, with all three guys in striking distance. Tom had an errand shot in the 9th that took him out of it as long as the other guys marked. Jason finished first, and threw a good shot but left a high 8 pin. He then missed his 2nd single pin spare that game to open in the 10th frame and finish with 253 with handicap. This meant that Zack, had a chance to get up in the 10th and strike to win against an opponent who had been striking all day but happened to miss two easy spares at the worst time. Zack threw a pretty good shot and as the ball hit the pins the 7 and 10 were still standing as pins flew around them...... but the 7 fell first and the 10 fell soon after but, slowly to give Zack an exciting first time title and $1,000.00. Not to mention he was a Parlay Power Player, so he becomes the 5th player to turn $25 into $1,000.00!
Congrats to everyone and we look forward to seeing you at Brunswick Kyrene on September 27th and 28th!
