Women’s Bowling | 11/11/2021 6:30:00 PM
North Carolina A&T senior bowler Pam Warr considers herself a simple girl.
She likes to watch Netflix. She enjoys traveling. Ms. Warr also doesn’t mind a good seafood dinner. How she fell in love with the sport of bowling was very simplistic.
This weekend, Warr and her Aggie teammates will travel to Baltimore, Md., for the first Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) meet of the season, hosted by Morgan State.
But long before Warr arrived in Greensboro to help the fifth-ranked Aggies become one of the best collegiate bowling programs in the country, she simply picked up a controller that belonged to the once-popular Nintendo Wii (pronounced like the word “We'”) game console.
A similarly popular bowling game came with the Wii Sports package. Warr’s father recognized first that his daughter was pretty good at the game. He also realized that her technique while mastering the game could not be overlooked. So Warr’s father drove her over to AMF Lanes in Norfolk, Va., and signed her up for the youth league.
One day, Warr bowled strikes on a Wii game. Years later, she bowled strikes for the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) champion Aggies. She bowled strikes in the NCAA tournament, and last season she nearly helped the Aggies win the United States Bowling Congress (USBC) national championship.
A year ago, the Aggies were so good; they even bowled a 289 during the USBC tournament before finishing as the national runner-up.
“Everybody was connected and focused,” Warr said. “It felt like it was just us in the lanes; no one else in any other lane mattered. It was just us doing our thing, doing what we do best, in our element.”
Warr’s ascension to becoming a collegiate bowler did not come easy. Family can often dictate direction, and Warr’s two older sisters were softball players.
“I thought I was supposed to do softball too. I didn’t want to do anything different,” Warr said.
But being different, set the path for her in a way that would be well-rewarded. Warr has been bowling for eleven years. She is in her fourth season with the Aggies. In her time in Aggieland, she has bowled in two MEAC championship matches.
The Aggies have finished nationally ranked each of the past three seasons Warr has been in the program. She has been a part of the team. They finished with the program’s highest ranking ever, No. 6 in the National Tenpin Coaches Association (NTCA) poll, after the 2021 season.
What took Warr from Wii to A&T? Well, that was simple too.
“Coach Kim,” said Warr referring to A&T head bowling coach Kim Terrell-Kearney.
Terrell-Kearney and Warr met when Warr was in high school. Terrell-Kearney referred to Warr as a special part of the team.
“She was reserved when she first got here but has come out of her shell.” Said Terrell-Kearney. “She makes everyone feel as if they are a part of the team by the way she speaks and leads by example.”
There cannot be a more exemplary example than Warr. Yet, in her four years at A&T, she has had to wait her turn to step into the regular rotation. Outstanding bowlers such as All-Americans Cameron Strombeck, Ana Olaya, Melanie Katen and Ericka Quesada have occupied the top-five bowling positions in the Aggies rotation.
This season, Warr leads the Aggies in total pins with 2,108. She is averaging 210.8 pins per game. Warr finds inspiration in African American bowler Gazmine “GG” Mason. She also finds inspiration in another African-American bowling great. Her coach Kim Terrell-Kearney is a member of several bowling Halls of Fame.
“I wish there were more black girls bowling,” said Warr. “There are a lot of collegiate black girls that are really good, but I don’t know if they are going to go pro. With me, where I am now, I want to change that or help in some way. I wish that a lot of us would continue bowling and break that stereotype.”
How Warr fell in love with the sport of bowling may have been simple. But she understands why it’s easy for others to stray from the sport. Warr says it takes time and patients to excel at bowling.
“Bowling is 70 percent mental and 30 percent physical,” said Warr, a mechanical engineering major. “You must have a positive mental game to succeed. Trust the process.”
It sounds simple enough, but it’s not.
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