When I was in high school, I did pretty well in the three sports I went out for - football, track and baseball. After graduating college, I picked up the game of tennis, and at least I didn’t make a fool of myself on the courts and would routinely beat my partner, former Monroe County Court of Common Pleas Judge Peter O’Brien.

I was asked by the then-Monroe County dean of the bowling scene, Ernie Transue, to join the WVPO bowling team. That “yes” should have been a “no,” because I could never get the hang of bowling.

For five years that I bowled for the team, I improved little, despite coaching from an exasperated Transue. My three-game average for those seasons was 136. I had just one 200 game during the five-year span - 225, which left me beyond giddy. That made up for my disastrous game of 94 on a night I should have forgotten but never did.

For those of you unfamiliar with bowling, the object is to knock down as many pins as you can in 10 frames. During the first nine frames, you can have up to two balls to knock down all the pins. If you do it on the first ball, it’s called a “strike”; if you accomplish it on two balls, it’s called a “spare.” If you fail to knock down all of the pins in two balls, it is called an open frame, a condition with which I was intimately familiar during my bowling experience. In the 10th frame, if you make a strike, you get two extra shots; if you make a spare, you get one extra shot.

A perfect game consists of 12 strikes in a row. While I knew several people in my league who had rolled perfect games in practice, none had ever rolled one in league play.

Achieving perfect games became more commonplace years after I set aside my bowling ball. Even so, I was in awe of such an accomplishment. During my day, a 700-plus series (three games) was a rare achievement. Professionals average between 230 and 240 per game these days, which translates into a 700-plus series.

All of this is leading up to how impressed I was to have read in Rich Strack’s article that a Palmerton woman, Shawntel Heydt, rolled an 818 series recently at Fritz Lanes in Lehighton. This score came on games of 289, 279 and 250.

I checked with some bowling experts about her achievement. “It’s just about the toughest thing to do in league or tournament play,” said one pro bowler from southeastern Pennsylvania. The reason, he said, is the bowler must average at least 267 for three games; you can’t have an off game. Shawntel averaged 273 during her incredible performance.

To me, this is other-worldly, because you rarely see scores this high around our area, or anywhere for that matter, and when you do, they are usually achieved by a man. It got me thinking: Has anyone ever rolled a perfect series of 900? In my own mind, this appears nearly impossible since it involves rolling 36 strikes in a row, but, guess what, there have been 40 sanctioned 900 series rolled by 39 different individuals in the United States.

Robert Mushtare of Fort Drum, New York, is the only bowler to have done it twice, and he did it in back-to-back years - December 2005 and two months later in February 2006.

Among the bowlers in this rarefied air 900 club include three from Pennsylvania - Jeff Campbell of New Castle in 2004, Dale Gerhard of Linden (Lycoming County) in 2016 and Stephen Kosela of Aliquippa in 2022.

As for Shawntel, she isn’t thinking about a 900 series. Her first order of business is to get the elusive sanctioned perfect game of 300. That’s certainly tough enough. As for her incredible 818 series, this puts her on top of the leader board at Fritz Lanes, and, given how difficult it is to achieve a score of this magnitude, she is likely to stay there for a while.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.