Striking an opportunity of a lifetime, senior bowler Dylan Harnden trained with Team USA in June for five days in Texas. 

“I started in 2019 at the end of sixth grade, I just found it interesting. One of my friends had taken me out bowling and my dad bowled before I started and used to do it a lot, but a lot of why I started came from interest,” Harnden said. 

With a newfound skill, Harnden honed his affinity for bowling to make his way up to the level he’s at now, working with Olympic trainers. At camp, Harnden focused and leaned in on the physicality of bowling. 

“A lot of the camp was working on the physical game and making minor tweaks. But some of the abilities that I learned were how to read the lane graphs, learning the length of the lane and how the lanes transition,” Harnden said.

There is an obvious jump when a high school student goes from training with their day-to-day coaches to trainers who work with people representing the country. The leap from local to national and from the basics to professional can be demoralizing to athletes in some ways. Harnden, however, took every bit of advice in his stride and rolled with it. 

“The coaches there compared to high school, they know a lot more because they represent the country. When it came to physical game, they knew a lot more about fixing it and were able to see a lot of the smaller things,” Harnden said

On a typical training day Harnden would start at 9 a.m. and end sometime in the evening. Throughout the days they would balance physical, technical and mental aspects of bowling, with some of them taking on more weight than others. Battling the mentality of the game, they went through how to think positively instead of negatively during a game which maintains strategy and helps with focus.

The three primary coaches that trained with Harnden were: Kelly Kulik, Mike Shady and Andy Diercks. Diercks and Harnden held the closest bond since they worked together the longest at the training camp. However, the one person who stuck with him even longer is his father, Mark Harnden.

“It’s an honor and privilege to be able to work with such a talented bowler. I’m very proud of Dylan and of all of his accomplishments and I’m very excited to see what the future holds for him,” Mark Harnden said.

With opportunities opening up to Harnden such as this one, more keep coming in to solidify his future in the sport. University recruiters over time noticed his game and Harnden received recruitment letters from multiple establishments. In anticipation of going onto the collegiate level, Harnden plans on becoming a member of the Olympic bowling team in the future. 

“That (the Olympics) is my goal,” Harnden said. “I’m going to work and try to beat the top bowlers in the country, which is hard to do, but hopefully in the future I will be able to.”

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