Talk to High School Students
I had the great pleasure to speak with some high school students in the Putnam County school district here in Florida. Check out the article here.
Here are some of the questions we covered.
What was the first sport you competed in?
I first started playing horseshoes. It’s not a super popular game, but it’s something I got introduced to when I was young and went out and practiced and got very good very quickly. When I was ten years old, I went to the World Horseshoe Championships, which are mainly in the United States. In the qualifying rounds I had 45 ringers out of 50 shoes at ten years old. I was very good. I finished second that year in the
junior division. The next year I won the junior class at eleven. I was the youngest to win the junior class and broke the record for the high average with 86%. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of money in
horseshoes. I didn’t realize that at the time, but I didn’t care. It was
something I enjoyed doing.
When did you first start bowling?
I think I was about eleven when I first got introduced to bowling. I bowled one year when I was and did okay at it. I come from a large family, with seven kids, and bowling is a little expensive, so it wasn’t really fair for me to bowl and nobody else.
You started bowling again in High School.
When I was a senior in high school, I got reintroduced to bowling in PE class and after a couple of years got pretty good at it, basically because of my underhand arm swing from playing horseshoes carried over to bowling. I was able to get good fairly quickly without putting in an excessive amount of time. I was pretty fortunate.
Despite your success in bowling, you went to college.
I went to college and got a degree in physics with a minor in mathematics. When I started college, I had no ambitions of being on the bowling tour. It was kind of halfway through college that I got really good and started bowling at local tournaments where I lived and was able to make money doing that. I had an interest in bowling but I didn’t have any real desire to try to make a living at it. I didn’t realize that it was going to be a real possibility.