Nov. 7, 2014
Hello everyone!
Sorry it has been a while since I have sent a blog post; the internet connection is quite poor here and it’s often hard to get a good connection.
Since I last wrote I have completed three days of qualifying. As I mentioned earlier, each day we bowl five games and after 20 qualifying games there will be a cut to the top 24 players. My first day of qualifying on Monday went very well. I shot 1,129 for five games which is an average of about 225. That put me in third place overall after both women’s squads bowled. I was slightly behind Team Sweden and about 50 pins behind Team Philippines.
Day Two of qualifying also went very well; however, I did not feel as though I threw the ball as well. Even though I felt this way I managed to have an overall higher score on the day of 1,151. This block was book-ended by a 260 and 259 game, both on the live streaming pairs. After the second day was completed I moved up to second place, passing Team Sweden and getting closer to the Philippines.
Yesterday (Thursday) was my third block of qualifying. This day went the best of all. I felt like I threw the ball very well for the entire day, my coach Rod Ross and I worked very well together, and my score showed it. I shot 1,171 for the five games, an average of 234 on the day. This big day shot me into first place overall! I passed the Philippines by about 25 pins and put a bigger gap between myself and the rest of the field.
Today I am preparing for my final block of qualifying and I plan on not looking back. I am going to go out there one game at a time and do the best I possibly can. This is a long tournament format and there are many games left to bowl before getting to the ultimate goal. One day at a time, one game at a time.
While I haven’t been bowling I have been trying to keep myself occupied. There isn’t a whole lot to do in the city that we haven’t done already. The city square I talked about before is a popular spot for us to visit. Walking around the city and that square at night is really awesome, it is beautiful. As I mentioned, there are a lot of churches and at night these churches are lit up and it really is a neat sight to see. Each night we are also trying to go different places to eat and attempting to try some different foods. Last night we ordered an appetizer that we thought was just calamari. However, when the plate came out we were a bit surprised when there were two baby Octopus on the plate. Although I have been trying to try different things, I just couldn’t get myself to eat the full octopus. Haha!
I took a few pictures of the bowling center. There is a full glass wall that you can see. It really keeps the crowd from interacting at all with the bowlers. At times you can see bowlers trying to talk to people behind the wall through the small cracks in between each glass panel. Even then it is still very hard to hear anything.
Also bowling is my male teammate, Chris Barnes. He has struggled a little bit the first couple of days with finding a consistent shot. Currently he is sitting in sixth place, which to many is amazing, but to Chris it is not good enough. I know that in these next few days we will start seeing some bigger and better blocks of bowling from him and we will see him begin to climb in the standings.
Today I bowl at 11:30 am here which is 5:30 am eastern time. I’m ready to get out there and close out the qualifying games with a bang and roll my way into the round of 24 tomorrow!
For now that is all from Wroclaw! I will send another blog soon! #TeamUSA2014
Brittni
