The daughter of a former Professional Bowlers Association member and granddaughter of a bowling alley proprietor, Lebahn spent as much time toddling around the local lanes as her playmates did at tea parties.
“She used to go around here in her walking stroller,” recalled her father, Dale Lebahn, during a Saturday afternoon conversation at North Bowl along the Palmer-Wasilla Highway. “She’s been in the bowling alley all her life, really. She started bowling when she was about 4, and when she was in junior high school I could see she had very good, basic bowling mechanics.”
  
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“It’s so frustrating when you know you want to get better and you know you can do really good, but there aren’t many women to go against,” she said. “You just want to keep bowling and bowling and bowling. My only competition really is my dad and a couple of the guys in the Friday night league. In Anchorage, it’s a little bit different because there are more women who are at the 200 (average) or so.”
And although very young by bowling standards, Lebahn is earning the credentials to support her dreams, said Dana Bachner, the house professional at North Bowl. Lebahn’s a 210 scratch bowler and has already thrown a pair of 300 games, which may be the first for the Valley’s only bowling alley.
“I’m not aware of any other woman shooting 300 here,” Bachner said. “She almost had another one here a couple weeks ago too. She got the first 11 strikes then threw a seven on the 12th for a 297. Yeah, she’s very good.”
In a sport dominated by men, Lebahn holds her own, Bachner said.
“She’s the best woman bowler in the Valley, by far,” he said. “In the state, she’s probably in the top five.”
And how do men react to getting beat by a former high school cheerleader?
“You mean after they get drubbed?” Bachner joked. “Hopefully, the humility will benefit them in the long run. In all honesty, she’s beaten all the best here. ... She could be professional — not at this point in time is she at that level, but at her age, yeah, most of the good pros are in their 30s and early 40s, so I’d say she’s way ahead of the field in that regard.”
Lebahn rolled her first 300 game as a senior in high school and her second this past December. She’s won Alaska’s largest women’s tournament the past two years, the Golden Heart Classic in Fairbanks, and is preparing to compete in next month’s United States Bowling Congress Queens tournament in El Paso, Texas. It’s there where she hopes to measure her game against some of the nation’s best amateur and professional female bowlers.
“My goal is to at least make the first cut, or even the second cut,” she said, adding that in her first Queens tournament last year she finished about 120th and missed the first cut.
But for women who want to make a living as professional bowlers, there is no gender-specific organization.
“Right now, women can bowl on the (Professional Bowlers) Tour with men, but the likelihood of women beating men when they’re all that good is real tough,” she said.
And that’s OK with Lebahn.
“I can be the best when I beat the best,” she said. “I think it’s just as hard for a woman to bowl on a hard oil pattern than it is for a man. It still takes talent, it still takes the same mindset. I may not be as strong or project the ball down the lane as hard as they can, but I can adjust my game just as well.”
Breaking into and beating the professional fraternity is no longer a pipe dream for women. Lebahn draws “a ton” of inspiration from Kelly Kulick, the premiere professional female bowler in the nation. Kulick recently beat out 62 of the sport’s best men to win a men’s Professional Bowlers Association title.
It’s an accomplishment ESPN The Magazine columnist Rick Riley calls groundbreaking for women’s sports.
“This is the equivalent of ‘Man Gives Birth!’ It’s never happened in any ball sport in American history,” Riley writes in the magazine’s March 8 edition.
Lebahn has met Kulick, who at 32 represents what the Valley woman hopes to accomplish over the next decade.
“I would love that to be me in 10 years, five years or even next year,” she said. “I’m completely confident that one year that could be me.”
Lebahn has met Kulick and said her PBA win “is absolutely amazing, and everything everyone is saying about her is 100 percent true. She’s really doing women justice in a big men’s sport. She was the first to win. It doesn’t matter who it is, you want a woman to win when you’re a woman. ... She is one I can really look to and compare myself to.”
Although she grew up in the bowling alley, Lebahn said she didn’t seriously consider bowling playing a major role in her future until she was a senior in high school.
That’s when she rolled her first 750 series and realized she could go to college on a bowling scholarship.
She spent a year on the Wichita (Kan.) State University team, one of the nation’s top bowling schools.
“The passion (for the sport) now is more than I ever thought it could be,” Lebahn said, adding she never tires of getting bowling-related gifts for Christmas and birthdays. “Yeah, I love it. I got two bowling balls for Christmas this year, I got one last year. We have a garage full of bowling balls, and my dad has just as many as me, if not more.”
Joining the professional ranks “is always there in my mind,” but that dream may have to wait for a little while, Lebahn said. First, that would mean moving her family out of Alaska to be closer to PBA Tour events.
“For now, I just want to keep bowling, whether I’m a league bowler for the rest of my life or I do more and go out and do big tournaments,” she said. “There are a lot of really good men, but at the end of the day I know I’m just as good and I can beat them.”
Contact Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.
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