The provincial tenpin championships on March 9 were unlike any other event Ethan Frehlick had competed in, but it didn’t hurt his performance.
Frehlick, 14, was one of 11 youth bowlers from Duncan Lanes who travelled to Splitsville in Nanaimo to compete live against bowlers from Nanaimo and virtually against another contingent in Kelowna. Frehlick took gold in the junior boys division, claiming his first provincial title and a chance to play at nationals in July, but it took some patience.
While Frehlick was bowling in Nanaimo, his competitors were hitting the lanes in Kelowna, so he wasn’t sure how they were doing.
“I tried to avoid looking at them until I was done,” Frehlick said. “Then I got pretty fixated on it.”
It was almost an hour between when Frehlick finished bowling and when the bowlers in Kelowna wrapped things up, so he was nervous for a while.
“I knew I bowled pretty well,” he acknowledged. “But I knew that some of the players bowling in Kelowna were pretty good, too.”
In the end, Frehlick’s score of 1,002 over six games was good for first place in his division, his first provincial title after previously taking a silver medal in 2018. Frehlick has also qualified for the provincial team that will travel to Thunder Bay, Ont. for the national championships on July 10-12. Nationals will be held at Mario’s Bowl, which just happens to be the same facility where his dad, Mike, competed at nationals in 1986, placing third.
Frehlick’s Duncan Lanes teammates also had strong showings at provincials. In the junior girls division, Danika Lazenby earned a bronze medal in her first trip to provincials, her score of 722 just 35 pins shy of silver. Paige Novak, who partnered with Lazenby to win the Cowichan Valley high school league championship this winter, placed fifth in the senior girls division with a 713 pinfall.
Aden Nettleton led a strong senior boys contingent with a score of 1,270, good for silver, while Alex Gammie took bronze with 1,126, Jeremy Garside was fifth at 1,034, and Dylan Marsden placed ninth at 971. The Duncan bantam boys were led by Kayden Richardson, who took silver with a score of 733. Markus Lawrence was third at 655, Ronin Frehlick was fourth at 576, and Robert Lazenby was sixth at 513.