Iowa High School Bowling Format

A Iowa high school varsity or junior varsity team consists of no more than 6 players competing in two rounds of competition.

INDIVIDUAL ROUND: Each of the six team members will bowl two individual games using cross-lane bowling procedures with the best 5 total pin scores being used to determine the team individual round total.

BAKER ROUND: Five of the team members will bowl 5, five person Baker Format games. Teams will bowl all frames of each Baker game on one lane, switching lane only between games. The total pin score of all 5 games will be used to determine the team Baker round total.

MATCH TOTAL: The highest combined pinfall total of both rounds wins the match. In case of a tie, there will be a roll-off consisting on 1 five person Baker game to determine the winner.

History of High School Bowling

From humble beginnings more than 60 years ago to recent explosive growth across the country, high school bowling has come along way.

The first officially recorded competition occurred in 1937 when Chicago's Milt Raymer, an American Bowling Congress Hall of Famer, organized a four-team boys' league at Tilden Technical High School in Chicago. Word of Raymer's program quickly spread to other schools, and soon the Chicago High School Bowling Club was developed to govern high school bowling activities. Other areas of the country became interested and Raymer began operating the American High School Bowling Congress from his basement in 1941.

In 1964, the Bowling Proprietors' Association of America created the Youth Bowling Association in conjunction with the National Federation of State High School Associations, which brought bowling to schools in the form of intramural programs and physical education classes. During this time, high school varsity bowling flourished in different parts of the country. While states like New York and New Jersey had recognized varsity bowling for quite some time, major cities such as Miami and Chicago granted varsity status to bowling in the 1960s and '70s.

More recently, the Northern Illinois Bowling Proprietors Association and the Bowling Centers Association of Michigan underscored the importance of high school bowling with their strong programs in the Rockford, Ill., area and statewide in Michigan. That model was followed in southern Illinois, where the first Illinois High School Boys Club Championship Tournament was started in 1998. Many other states used the framework of the Illinois program to implement their own.

In the last decade, participation in high school bowling has nearly tripled. Under the guidance of the USBC High School program, varsity high school bowling currently exists in 19 states and at the club level in another 28 states. During the 2007-08 season, more than 52,000 students competed at 4,656 schools that offered high school varsity bowling competition. In fact, bowling was the largest-growing high school sport in the 2007-08 school year, continuing a decade-long trend, according to the most recent National Federation of State High School Associations participation survey.

In 2007 the Iowa High School Athletic Association and the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union sanctioned bowling as a high school sport. Over the years, the number of teams participating has steadily grown; and in 2014/15 season the sport expanded from two to three classes. The Pella Community School District partnered with Pella Excit-A-Bowl to add bowling as a sanctioned sport starting with the 2015/16 season.