What was already a banner week for area high school boys bowling nearly turned into more for both Liverpool and Cicero-North Syracuse when they gathered for Thursday’s Section III Shootout at Rome’s King Pin Lanes.
Five days earlier, in Utica, the Liverpool boys had held off Utica Proctor by just 20 pins to win the sectional Division I team tournament and a berth in next month’s state championships.
Now individuals from Liverpool and C-NS looked for their own tickets to Strike-N-Spare Lanes for the state tournament, needing to finish in the top two individual spots.
On the boys side, C-NS’s Tim Cloonan immediately put himself in contention thanks to an opening-game 252 that put him atop the standings, but he slumped to a 160 and 189 in the next two games to go to 601 and fall through the pack.
Then, in the fourth game, Cloonan strung together strikes in a 266, and after a 173 finished strong with a 267 that climbed him all the way to third place at 1,307 and the alternate spot for the state tournament, 38 pins behind Indian River’s E.J. Omelia.
Cloonan’s Northstars teammate, J.J. O’Connell, would finish 17th in the 34-man field. He opened with a 218, but never matched that total again, doing as well as a 203 in the fifth game as he got a total pinfall of 1,115.
Central Square’s Dimitri Queior was the individual champion, having shot 711 in the first three games and, with the battle close, finished off with a 278 final game to win at 1,426. Whitesboro’s Tom Davis had a 300 game on his way to a fifth-place finish.
Meanwhile, in the girls Section III Shootout, Liverpool’s Ashley Hardy would, like Cloonan, finish third, one spot out of automatically advancing to the state tournament.
Hardy shot a 243 in her opening game, trailing only C-NS’s Elianna Pitts, who had a 247. But as Pitts fell back, Hardy added a 220 to briefly take the lead before a 183 left her third, but within three pins of East Syracuse Minoa’s America Carhart and Utica Proctor’s Kaitlynn Conte in a tight battle for first place.
During the fourth game, Hardy shot 204 to pass Conte, only to shoot 166 and 172 in the last two games as Conte, with 253 and 232, finished at 1,323, just behind Carhart’s winning 1,341, and Hardy was third with 1,188.
Pitts, for her part, never shot better than 167 in any of the four games following that opening 247, but finished with a 231 to rise back to eighth place in the field of 26 bowlers with a pinfall of 1,100.
