Finding Vanderbilt
Growing up, Barnes didn’t have to go far to find bowling. She just had to decide not to run away from it. Her parents owned a bowling alley in Vandalia, Illinois, the sort of small town an hour east of St. Louis where such an establishment was a community hub. But like having an ice cream parlor as the family business, there can be too much of a good thing.
While she has always been competitive (even now, her husband doesn’t dare suggest a casual trip to the golf range), she initially channeled that into sports other than bowling. Anything to get away from another night on the lanes. The thing is, when you do something often enough, you get rather good at it. When you get good at it, you win. And she liked winning. A lot. So, she bowled. And eventually, that marriage of convenience turned into something with staying power.
“As I got deeper into the sport, there were so many challenges and obstacles that make it unique,” Barnes said. “You can’t really master any sport; there’s always somebody coming up who is going be one step ahead of you. But in bowling, just with the elements that continue to change, whether it’s our understanding of the science behind it, the balls, the oils and the changing of patterns—it’s like a puzzle that as soon as you think you figured out, it knocks you on your butt again. I’ve just always loved that. I still love that.”
The first NCAA Women’s Bowling Championship was in 2004, when Barnes was in high school, but some universities had been awarding scholarships since the NCAA designated bowling an emerging sport almost a decade earlier. There was already a pecking order. And even as the eventual salutatorian of her high school class, Barnes concedes that winning a national championship was at the top of her selection criteria. She piled up junior titles, winning everything from state titles to gold medals at international events from El Salvador to the Dominican Republic. She had her pick of college programs. Then John Williamson and a Vanderbilt program barely out of the incubator stepped in, with an assist from a mother and father casting an eye toward a future beyond Vandalia.
“I had in my mind where I was going to go to school from the time I was 12 years old, because I just wanted to win a national championship,” Barnes said. “But once Vandy added their program, it really changed my thought process on what that could look like. There was definitely some shock, I think, attached to my decision.”
Finding Her Lane
Let’s just say she lived up to the hype. From Mikayla Blakes winning national honors on the basketball court to Sophia Webster making history as an All-American on the tennis court to Janie Ford winning an SEC title in track and field, among other examples, Vanderbilt has been blessed of late with remarkable first-year standouts who waste no time making their presence felt. But Barnes still has bragging rights. She didn’t just earn All-America and National Player of the Year honors in her debut. She helped lead Vanderbilt to the first team national championship in school history and was named NCAA Tournament MVP for a program in just its third season. Barnes went on to win National Player of the Year a second time and was an All-American in each of her four seasons.
And even as one part of a talented ensemble that put Williamson’s Commodores on the map, competing alongside All-Americans like Karen Grygiel, Michelle Peloquin and Tara Kane en route to the title, Barnes’ contribution went beyond the pins she knocked down.
“The attitude that she had about her when she was on the lanes, it was contagious,” said LaGeorge, who arrived two years after Barnes and was named NCAA Freshman of the Year in her debut season. “It was about getting better and competing and being the best that we can be. It was about giving it your all every day, and getting 1 percent better every day. That was what she brought to the table.”
She was already shaping the future of the program even then. Another decorated youth bowler, LaGeorge liked Vanderbilt when she visited as a recruit. Still, on the flight home to upstate New York, she told her mom she didn’t think she wanted to go there. An excellent student, Vanderbilt’s academics nonetheless made her nervous. But she stayed in touch with Barnes, her host on the visit. A big-time recruit like Barnes choosing Vanderbilt had helped put the school on LaGeorge’s radar in the first place. The more they spoke, the more convinced LaGeorge was that she could make it in Nashville—that she’d have a sisterhood around her every step of the way. When she ultimately decided to commit, she initially couldn’t reach Williamson. So she called Barnes and enlisted her help to get in touch.
“Josie’s one of the best people I know,” LaGeorge said. “Everyone knows she’s a great bowler, a great coach, super competitive. But they don’t have the opportunity to see what a good person she is in all aspects of life. As special as she is on the lanes, competing and coaching, she’s that exact same way in everyday life, too. I’m just proud to call her a friend.”
By the time Barnes was a senior, Vanderbilt’s future as a bowling powerhouse seemed secure. Her own future, on the other hand, was about as certain as the proverbial 7-10 split. She came to Vanderbilt thinking she would do something with chemical engineering, a notion that lasted almost all the way through Labor Day and her first engineering classes. The child of small business owners, pursuing a graduate degree in some realm of finance or accounting seemed logical, if not inspiring.
But as the second semester of her final year rolled around, the panic never apparent in even the biggest moments on the lane was starting to fray her nerves away from the lanes. She wanted to bowl, but the original pro tour had folded in 2003, leaving a generation of bowlers with few post-college options. Surely, she reasoned, she hadn’t come all this way, taken on all these challenges, just to go back to Vandalia and live with her parents again.
Now well established in Vanderbilt lore, that’s when Williamson brought up coaching. He was hopeful the administration was about to approve a new assistant coaching position. Would she be interested? Her first thought was she wasn’t sure she would be any good. But it was something to do—and staying close to her sister, who would be entering her sophomore year with the Commodores, sounded fun. She decided to try it for a year or two.
Barnes and former head coach John Williamson, far right, with the Commodores at the 2026 Final Four (Sam Jordan/Vanderbilt Athletics).
She remembers a conversation with her mom not so very long into her coaching stint. The font of Josie’s competitiveness, Lisa Earnest stayed involved in youth bowling even after Josie and Jessica left for Vanderbilt. She’d often ferry kids to events in and around Chicago when they might otherwise have had difficulty getting there and back. After one trip north, she gushed to Josie about a young bowler. This girl, who might have been all of 10 years old at the time, had a champion’s will. Josie needed to keep an eye on her, Lisa urged.
Josie responded sarcastically that if she was still coaching by the time this girl got to college, someone should send a rescue party.
The young bowler was Mabel Cummins, who went on to be named the 2023 NCAA Player of the Year and who helped lead Vanderbilt, including then-associate head coach Barnes, to a third national championship.
Coaching, obviously, stuck. Just as bowling itself had once grown from a means to an end—winning—into a passion all its own for Barnes.
It’s a familiar axiom that great players often struggle to become great coaches, no matter the sport. They see things differently than the rest of us. Their bodies respond differently. Even Barnes jokes about conversations with senior Dannielle Henderson, a singular talent in her own right as a second-team All-American this past season, where the latter will playfully remind her coach “That’s the way you do it—I can’t do it like you.” But even such banter is evidence of what makes Barnes a successful communicator, even if few can do the things she does. A transfer who needed time to open up on her own terms, Henderson now feels comfortable enough with her coach to have that honest dialog, gently pushing back. And Barnes has the wherewithal to hear what she’s saying and find what works for Henderson and all of her bowlers, unlocking the lightbulb moments that are at least as satisfying a part of the job as the trophies and championships.
“Josie’s a really good listener,” LaGeorge said. “That’s really important, that she’s going to listen to what you have to say and then methodically think about how to properly respond to what it is that you're asking her. She’s not going to jump to conclusions, which I think is a great quality in a leader—and in a coach and a friend, it kind of spans all aspects of her life. She’s just a really good listener, which then makes her a really good communicator because she’s listening to what everyone has to say and trying to get to the deeper meaning of what is it that you’re actually coming to her about.”
She had plenty of mentors, few more consequential than the head coach she worked alongside for more than a decade. But for some of the most important lessons, bowling was only the backdrop. Across all those days in the bowling center, she watched her mom interact with people—managing staff and making customers welcome. Everyone’s money spends the same, she’d explain to her daughters. A successful enterprise creates community.
“Sometimes you instantly connect with kids, sometimes it takes time,” Barnes said. “I think my mom really helped me figure out that I might not be able to connect with every part of a kid, but what’s one thing that I can connect with them on that makes them feel seen and appreciated? She was really good at that.”
Tragically, Lisa Earnest never got to see Cummins bowl for Barnes and the Commodores. Her death in a 2019 traffic accident rocked Barnes in a way that touched every aspect of her life, her chosen profession included.
A year earlier, Vanderbilt had won its second national title, Barnes’ first as a coach. Within a day of the team lifting the trophy, her attention turned to what came next, the joy of a goal achieved fading almost before she unpacked her bag at home. Losing her mom so suddenly forced her to realize that every moment counts the same. You can’t waste them.
“I think a lot changed in that specific moment, because prior to that, it was very much like I was defined by the results I had, coaching or otherwise,” Barnes said. “I had to realize that today could suck, but is it really going to affect us three weeks from now? Probably not. The sun’s going to come up tomorrow. We’re going to come back with the same enthusiasm and goal that we had today, and we’re going to figure it out. We’re all living, we’re breathing. I try to tell the girls that bowling is something we do, not who we are.”
Barnes and Vice Chancellor Candice Storey Lee (Sam Jordan/Vanderbilt Athletics).
Finding the Next Chapter
For a first-time head coach, there has been plenty to do since Williamson announced in February that he would step away at the end of the season.
Barnes is among the longest-tenured coaches on campus. She knows her program. She is Vanderbilt bowling. And she inherits a team that returns all but two student-athletes from this past season’s Final Four run. But in part precisely because of the program’s continuity, as well as its decidedly humble origins, it has always been not wholly unlike a family business. She and Williamson didn’t need to write anything down. They knew each other’s strengths and how to complement each other. Each knew what he or she needed to do.
In that sense, for all that is familiar, she is starting anew. So perhaps it’s no surprise that in reaching out to many of her Vanderbilt peers for advice, she forged a particularly strong connection with volleyball head coach Anders Nelson. Prior to restarting Vanderbilt’s program, he was a long-serving assistant at Kentucky under a head coach who essentially built a national power from something close to the ground up. As a first-time head coach, Nelson couldn’t rely on institutional memory. He couldn’t assume the people he brought in intuitively understood what he was looking for, the way he had after more than a decade with his former boss. For staff, let alone student-athletes, to feel confident in their roles and comfortable with the expectations therein, communication was critical.
As one of her first steps, Barnes wrote a handbook that detailed duties, expectations and goals for the program—all while understanding it had to be a living document, flexible enough to change and adapt to these fast-moving times.
“I see where I want us to go,” Barnes explained, “But how do I put that in context for everyone that’s involved?”
After the team returned from the Final Four, she met with those student-athletes who could return and handed out the new student-athlete handbook. She didn’t want to assume they knew her expectations moving forward just because they knew how things had worked before. She wanted them to have all possible information, so that if they weren’t sure her vision meshed with theirs, they had time to explore other options.
They’re all still here, eager to start writing the program’s next chapter and accumulating the experiences that will shape their own stories.
“I want them to feel like they can meet any challenge head on after this,” Barnes said. “They are going to go through so many challenges here, athletically, mentally, academically, and they’re not always going to know the answer. Even as an adult, we sometimes walk into spaces way beyond our comfort zone, where we don’t have the answers. But I want them to have the confidence and the background to say, ‘I might not know what the heck’s going on, but I know I can figure this out and get it done.’”
She’s been there. One of a kind in so many ways, she was once a senior trying to figure out what she was supposed to do with the rest of her life. Just like every other senior.
She just had to find her lane.
“I’ve always found that as much as I enjoy competing, like when I’m still out there doing the pro events, I feel like I’m at my best when I’m in a team setting,” Barnes said. “There aren’t really a lot of opportunities for that after college for bowlers. Coaching has been a way for me to still feel like I’m a part of a team and making an impact. And I can’t really envision my life going any other direction now that I look back on it.”
She just had to find Vanderbilt.
About Anchored for Her
Through Anchored for Her, a comprehensive fundraising campaign, Vanderbilt is positioning bowling and its broader women’s athletics programs as national leaders in advancing women’s sports. Anchored for Her’s initial $50 million goal will fuel investment in sustainable success for a new era of collegiate athletics through facility enhancements, endowed scholarships, coaching and staff positions, capital support and naming opportunities, team-specific Excellence Funds, the Women’s Athletics General Fund and the Competitive Excellence Fund.
