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By Randy York
Buried in a festival-like avalanche
of Nebraska’s upcoming sports weekend – a Spring Game in football, plus
home games/matches in volleyball, women’s soccer and women’s tennis –
is the NCAA Women’s Bowling Tournament
in Wickliffe, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. That’s important because this
Nebraska team is a legitimate national championship contender, and
Cleveland seems like a perfect venue for Bill Straub, now in Year 16 as Nebraska’s head women’s bowling coach.
It’s perfect because Cleveland’s a
blue-collar city, Straub’s a blue-collar coach and his team would be
just as well served wearing blue collars on their red-or-black team
shirts. The Huskers are, after all, student-athletes who have become
national championship contenders through hard work more than innate
talent. “Our primary skills are not really recruiting. They’re
development in the broadest sense of the work, both individually and
team-wise,” Straub told me one day at lunch. “It’s not necessarily that
we peak at springtime. It’s more a case of other schools recruiting
better bowlers than I’m able to recruit.”
I’ve known Bill Straub
since he was a pro bowler decades ago, so allow me to explain his
self-deprecating humor. Bill’s a grinder, a perfectionist and someone
with little need for fanfare. He wins the old-fashioned way and runs a
national caliber bowling team like a certain Hall-of-Fame football coach
executed his walk-on program. Straub says his salesmanship is so
lacking, he couldn’t get an Eskimo to buy a space heater. “I’m like the
vacuum cleaner salesman who goes door-to-door and when a lady opens the
door, he says: ‘You don’t want to buy a vacuum cleaner, do you?’ Well,
that’s how I recruit at Nebraska. I say: ‘You don’t want to be a Husker,
do you?’ And when they say yes, we’re onto something. That’s really not
much of an exaggeration. Sales skills and I do not get along. I’m just
not very good at making promises I can’t guarantee.
“We never tell recruits they can come to
Nebraska and start as freshmen. Our competitors do. We don’t. Bowling’s
an equivalency sport, and even though we have five scholarships, we’ve
never offered anybody a full ride, including Shannon Pluhowsky,
who became the greatest women’s college bowler ever when she left
Phoenix to come to Nebraska. She became a world champion, and yet she
was on a 50-percent scholarship here. Our competitors routinely offer
bowlers full rides. I don’t believe that’s the best way to do business.
If you give out full rides to the top five bowlers, where’s the growth?”
The growth is in development, the most
important word in Straub’s vocabulary. “We have advantages other schools
don’t have,” he said. “Once student-athletes get here, we have great
facilities, great training, great academic support and a budget that
will help them get the experience they need across the country. We don’t
recruit low-caliber students or athletes. We seek out people with the
athleticism and the potential to be really good. Sometimes, all they
need is development and the opportunity to showcase what they can do.”
One such bowler is Nebraska’s Kristina Mickelson,
a junior walk-on from Bellevue, Neb., and the Huskers’ No. 3 bowler in
the starting lineup. “She had the best match of her career and won the
big meet at Vanderbilt a few weeks ago,” Straub pointed out. “Almost all
the best bowlers in the country were at that meet. Kristina wasn’t
recruited by any. All she really needed was an opportunity and
development. Now that she’s had that, she’d be a starter on every team
in the country right now.”
Seniors Kayla Johnson and Valerie Calberry
are the Huskers’ top two bowlers. Johnson is a junior college transfer
from Illinois, and Calberry came to Nebraska from Brampton in Ontario,
Canada. The other bowlers in Nebraska’s starting lineup are Yan Ling, a sophomore from Singapore, and Liz Kuhlkin,
a freshman from Schenectady, N.Y. A lineup featuring student-athletes
from Singapore, Canada, New York, Illinois and Nebraska seems like
decent representation for a head coach who insists he isn’t much of a
recruiter.
We’ll find out this weekend if Nebraska +
development can trump an NCAA field loaded with full rides. Three years
ago, the Huskers won their national bowling championship in Canton,
Mich., the heart of Big Ten country. Straub described the experience as a 10 in every way,
and he’s wishing, hoping and maybe even counting on another inspired
run this week from a team that’s been built the old-fashioned way – from
the bottom up … the Nebraska way.
Send a comment or story idea to ryork@huskers.com
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