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LINCOLN — On Tuesday, the Hartington-Newcastle boys bowling team headed to the State finals after an impressive late push turned into a District title against the defending State champions and host Wayne.
The boys team, sans a junior, has five guys who are starting to really feel their game and it all started with an optimistic preseason.
“Coming into the season, we felt like we had a lot and could be a really good team,” head coach Nate Holan said. “We thought we would be hard to beat. We knew how good Wayne would be and we felt it would be a hard task to beat them at Districts. The ultimate goal was to win Districts and go to State, but we wanted to set ourselves up for a potential wildcard spot and have that in our back pocket.
“We felt like we could win enough to put our names in that discussion. Unfortunately, we had a hard time really getting started at the beginning of the season. We were close to beating some really good teams (teams that are in State), but just weren’t consistent enough to finish those games off.”
Holan said Christmas brought forth some of the consistency needed as the break ended. But the winter storms came and slowed their roll for two weeks.
“Our first dual back, we came out a little flat and lost that one,” Holan said. “Two days later, we bowled the same team and beat them while bowling a school record team game along with Alex Elks bowling a school record for highest game. Going into Districts, we knew there was a really good chance we would make the finals.”
The hot streak of solid performances in January led to the momentum people saw heading to Districts.
“We thought if we bowled in Districts like we did the week before, we would be in the finals with a chance to win,” Holan said. “I think getting to State will only help us moving forward as we will be able to have everyone back next year. We will have a better idea what it will take to continue to compete with the best teams in the state.”
Barrett Bruning, Memphis Ulrich, Alex Elks, Ben Kleinschmit and Christian Fiscus are the young men rolling with that expectation.
“(Going to State) means quite a lot,” Bruning said. “Wayne had beaten us in every dual we (saw) them at. We were really motivated. If we didn’t get something at a practice, we spent extra time practicing. We’ve been wanting to win for quite a while now and we just put in the time and we said we were going to win when we went there.
“We’ve had some momentum from the past few meets and we’ve been doing pretty good and we’ve just been trying to keep it up. We’ve been working harder at practice doing what we need to do to improve our games where we can.”
Bruning credited Holan for believing in the boys and keeping them on task even during the winter storms that ruined a number of scheduled meets and matches.
The State lanes have a lot of oil on them and he expected the team to arrive in Lincoln on Monday and get some work done there to get ready for the big meet.
“We got to keep it slow and not get in our heads,” Bruning said. “I think some of the other guys are a little nervous because they’ve never been able to go there before, but I’m not really too worried about it.”
Bruning went to State as an individual last year.
“We just need to go there, bowl and have fun,” Bruning said.
The girls fell short of State, but with only one senior – Faith Pinkelman – on the roster, the young bowlers missed another State bid after last year’s appearance.
“We had two new bowlers who didn’t have much experience with bowling,” Holan said. “We didn’t know how good we would be this year, kind of a wait-and-see kind of thing. The girls put a lot of time in. They worked hard in practice and Faith did such a nice job showing the rest of the team what they needed to do to be good.
“They bowled on their own every week outside of practice. That commitment helped them end up being a lot better than maybe we were expecting. It will help the girls coming back to continue to put the extra time in,” he said.
