Kaneland girls bowlers make do without facility in district

Beth Trafton lives within walking distance of Mardi Gras Lanes in DeKalb, home of the Kaneland girls bowling team.

It’s an undoubted perk for the program’s longtime assistant coach, but Trafton would surrender it in an instant. She’d rather see the Knights’ commutes on the team bus curtailed than her own.

“There’s an awesome corner at the corner of (Route) 47 and Keslinger (Road) in Elburn. There’s a big, empty corner,” Trafton said. “It only costs, like, I don’t know, somebody told me $4.5 million or something to build a bowling alley. I mean, it’s no big deal.”

Delivering that last bit with a grin and good humor, Trafton is nonetheless straightforward in her message: Kaneland could field far more than 12 athletes, the team’s size this season between varsity and JV, if a bowling center rested within the borders of Kaneland School District 302.

Until a large donation or the world’s biggest bake sale transforms reality, however, the nomadic Knights operate happily. Whether in transit or in shoes, they’re rolling.

Northern Illinois Big 12 counterpart DeKalb also practices and hosts competitions at Mardi Gras Lanes, and a Barbs’ banner rests next to the Knights’ on a side wall of the 36-lane facility.

Be it ever so 20 minutes from the Kaneland campus, there’s no place like home.

“I like that I’m always used to it, and it just helps me do better when we’re at home when we’re used to the lanes,” Knights junior Grace Lindgren said.

Lindgren grew up bowling, much like Jim McKnight, Kaneland’s coach since 1989, who drives the bus to the alley. He did the same when the Knights were based at AMF Valley Lanes in North Aurora, which closed in 2010.

Whatever his route, he is no stranger to related or even repeat trains of thought on the ride. Despite a cultural change that has marginalized bowling in some areas, the Freeport-bred McKnight relishes the opportunity to be around the sport and guide students eager to learn.

“Me, growing up ... in the (1960s) and ’70s, bowling was king. Everybody bowled,” McKnight said. “Kids, that was your Saturday recreation. Everybody bowled. Sometimes even on Sunday afternoons. But I think bowling had a bit of a downturn in the ’80s and especially the ’90s. It’s a very different game than it was.”

Automatic scoring and synthetic lane surfaces add creature comforts to the early days of bowling, while many serious bowlers order personalized shoes and balls.

On a state level, the opportunity to participate in high school bowling has steadily grown. The IHSA first offered girls bowling as a state series sport in 1973. This season’s field will include 220 schools – 15 fewer than 2014-15 but 137 more than McKnight’s first season at Kaneland.

Boys bowling debuted as an IHSA state series sport in 2002-03, when 111 schools entered. The 2015-16 field will include 190 schools.

McKnight and Trafton aren’t disputing the importance of these opportunities, they simply know what would increase them for Kaneland students, even the ones using house shoes and bowling balls.

“Just to have that Saturday morning youth league where they get used to it and stuff makes a huge difference,” Trafton said. “We don’t have that.”

McKnight also acknowledges the climate shift in youth and club sports, and figures the climb toward specialization also has claimed a few would-be participants.

Is the novelty of saying you bowled for your high school team worth all those frequent rider miles?

Although Kaneland has produced several collegiate bowlers through the years, most recently 2015 graduate Dominique Lee of Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, those cases are the exception.

“They don’t tend to stick with it,” Trafton said. “It’s got to be a priority.”

Yorkville, a second-year program that defeated Kaneland at Mardi Gras Lanes last week, finds the same predicament.

Although Yorkville Bowl is not far from campus – and fittingly adjacent to a thoroughfare named Leisure Street – coach Julie Renda, a four-year bowler at Hoffman Estates, said the Foxes are “in the infant stages” of building a youth feeder program.

In the here and now, though, Yorkville enjoys a luxury some don’t.

“Being able to just go to the bowling alley right after school and practice whenever, it’s great,” Foxes junior Hannah Jaros said.

A survey conducted by Elburn’s Chamber of Commerce during last year’s Christmas Stroll revealed citizen interest in a bowling alley is there.

Trafton already has a corner picked out, but she and McKnight would be agreeable to other locales.

The Knights receive a piece of candy for each strike they roll, and on 4 p.m. or 4:30 match days, it’s sustenance before dinner.

Kaneland bowling parents, like the children they support, are well-traveled. Imagine one of them being in position to say the candy will spoil the meal instead.