For the third time in her career, East Syracuse Minoa girls bowler Haley Youker reached perfection.
Youker did so during Tuesday’s match against Oswego at Lighthouse Lanes, where the main story in the Spartans’ 3-0 victory was seeing Youker pull off the best series of the Section III campaign.
It began with an opening game where Youker reeled off 11 consecutive strikes. When the 12th ball crashed through the pocket and all 10 pins fell, Youker had her 300 game.
And it didn’t stop there. A 197 second game preceded a third game where, after an initital spare, Youker finished with another string of 11 strikes in a row for a 290 that led to a three-game total of 787.
It was the second time in as many seasons that Youker, a senior headed for Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, reached 300 in a match for ESM, having done so in January 2017 on the same day as Spartans boys bowler Hunter Borkowski at Strike-N-Spare Lanes in a sweep of Christian Brothers Academy.
The match against Oswego also included a 509 series for Kathleen Bayly and a 504 series from Elizabeth D’Agostino. The Buccaneers’ Kaitlyn Grant had nine straight strikes in a 267 game as part of her 626 set.
Meanwhile, in the ESM boys team’s 3-0 shutout of Oswego, no one was perfect, but Brett Smith’s 248 game did lead to a 624 set as Ryan MacCombie, who recorded a school-record 854 series against Auburn the week before, had a 598 set this time. Eric Carson gave the Bucs a 712 series and 255 high game.
