Jacqueline Lewis, Mineola end season in winning way

Jacqueline Lewis is ending her high school bowling career in celebration.

The senior bowler at Mineola led her team to its second consecutive Nassau Division I girls bowling team championship at Garden City Lanes. Mineola scored 4,778 to beat MacArthur’s 4,690.

“My favorite part is just the team,” Lewis said. “The people on the team, the coaches, we all just form a family, and then we get out there and crush it.”

Lewis, who rolled team-high 1,023 across six games, is in just her second year of varsity bowling at Mineola (13-0). All she’s done is win with Mineola.

For junior Kelsey Morrison, she’s felt the pain of season-ending losses. In eighth and ninth grade, she lost the Nassau team championships by 16 pins and one pin after a roll off, respectively. To overcome such heartbreakers, she’s elated to be in the position she’s in now.

“This just means the world to do this for my family, my friends and my coach,” Morrison said.

Morrison and her team will have another chance to claim the state team championships at Strike ’N Spare Lanes in Syracuse on March 10-12. With a bit more experience and comfortability on the stage, coach Mark Miller is hoping to improve on last year’s outing.

Seaford’s coach Scott Nastazio is thinking similarly about the state championships as his team cruised to its second consecutive Division II team championship. The Vikings scored 4,731 beating second place Lawrence by 845.

“There’s a lot of anxiety with the girls knowing that they have to compete (with) upstate girls who are really, really good,” Nastazio said. “And hopefully this year, we don’t focus on outside lanes, we focus on our own lanes, so they don’t get themselves nervous.”

While the players rally around each other and work together, Ava Caruso, a sophomore, knows she has a lot of responsibility as a captain to lead Seaford (11-1). She bowled a 1,040 and teammate Megan Reder added a 1,017 composite and 234 high game.

Caruso was also captain as a freshman, however, she admitted she didn’t have the most experience on the team. Now, she does, but there’s still a lot of pressure. She’s the leader of a team full of sophomores trying to continue Seaford’s winning history.

“It was really stressful knowing the legacy that we had to keep it up,” Caruso said. “Seeing all these bowlers come through, and how amazing they’d been, I didn’t want to let them down and end the streak.”