Beat the Champs: Experiencing a second chance at the women's finals

Beat the Champions: Experiencing a second chance at the women’s finals

By Dale Bowman

Beat the Champions poster for 2018-19.
Dale Bowman/Sun-Times

Jan Tau is cramming for her second return to the women’s finals of Beat the Champions.

“I will be better prepared this year,” she emailed. “I had no clue what to expect in 2011 [when she won a bowling ball]. This year, besides being on two regular leagues, I have subbed on a few teams in the last month to get more competitive practice. I’ve also done the Lions Club charity tournament and the Illinois Women’s state tournament these last two weekends. I’ve bowled A LOT.”

The 32 women finalists of the 58th BTC meet at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 10, at Liberty Lanes in Carpentersville. In the finals, bowlers roll four games, moving two pairs of lanes after each game.

Tau, youth director at Lisle Lanes since 2000, has been to Liberty Lanes, but maybe just to see her daughter bowl. One of Tau’s bowling memories came when she rolled a 300 during the second game of the Lisle Saturday Morning Youth League’s 2012 BEAT THE COACH tournament.

“Fifty kids and their parents can all say that they have seen a 300 game now,” she emailed.

The Naperville woman comes with a 171 average and 176 pins of handicap. In BTC, the charity event by the Chicagoland Bowling Proprietors Association, handicap is 90 percent of the difference an average is below 220. None of the finalists are scratch. The closest was Ashley Jackson, out of Centennial Lanes, with a 203 average and 61 pins of handicap.

“The Wednesday Strikers league [at Lisle Lanes] has been 100 percent in the Beat The Champs as long as I remember,” Tau noted.

She is not alone in returning to the finals. Malika Manouzi, a physical education teacher at Morton High School, took fifth three years ago. Karen Mrozek, a retiree from Chicago, reached the finals in the 1970s when she bowled at now-demolished Marzano’s Miami Bowl. She won a microwave.

All finalists receive a prize from bowling balls to electronics to the top prize of $7,500.

But the important numbers in BTC, which the Sun-Times helps sponsor, remains the $2,872,914.93 raised for charity, in its first 57 years, from 5,789,515 entries.

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Women’s Finalists

At Liberty Lanes, Carpentersville

2 P.M. Sunday

Bowler, Center Ave., Hcp

Carmen Arocho, Diversey 120#, 360

Lauren Block, Arlington 171, 176

Lourdes Cardenas, Lakeside 166, 194

Teresa Duran, AMF Forest 142, 280

Bridgette Gordan, Lakewood 163, 205

Jennifer Gritzenbach, Orland 156, 230

Kim Hammelman, Suburbanite 197, 82