The Vanderbilt women's bowling team opens its season Friday at the Fairleigh Dickinson Invitational in New Jersey, as the preseason No. 2 squad looks to cap off a wonderful career for coach John Williamson's first recruited senior class.
"It's hard to believe that our first recruits are already seniors," Williamson said. "They have worked hard to make Vanderbilt bowling the top program in the country."
Vanderbilt founded its bowling program in September of 2004 in order to conform to new NCAA Division I-A membership requirements. After having some moderate success in that first year with a team of walk-ons, the program signed its first recruiting class, including current seniors Karen Grygiel, Tara Kane, Kaitlin Reynolds and Michelle Peloquin.
These seniors have earned All-American honors a combined six times in bringing this fledgling program to prominence from scratch when they came to Nashville.
"It has been amazing just to see how far we have come as a team from when we first started," Grygiel said.
This class created the framework for the success that was to follow, including a National Championship for the 2006-07 season, just the third year of competition for the Commodores.
One of the leaders of this team is junior Josie Earnest, who was named National Player of the Year last season in leading the Commodores to the National Semifinals in 2008.
"The National Player of the Year award meant a lot to me," Earnest said. "I want to build off of it, but it doesn't have a lot of bearing on what will go on this year. I'm ready for another fantastic season."
Junior Ashley Belden and sophomores Amanda Halter, Brittany Garcia, Ellen Morrison and Katie Lammers round out the returnees on the roster, and the team welcomed highly touted freshman Brittni Hamilton this fall.
Williamson believes the underclassmen were influenced by the early success of the current seniors.
"They were the first group to take a chance on our new team and since then the best players in the country have come here to be part of what these seniors started," he said.
The Commodores enter this season with their sights set on another great season, as defending national champion University of Maryland Eastern Shore narrowly edged them out for the preseason No. 1 ranking.
Grygiel does not mind starting off the season in second.
"It means that we are pumped to regain that number one spot," she said.
But preseason rankings do not mean anything once the season gets started, which is why the Commodores are looking to build on their early success in order to bring a second national title back to campus.
"If we take care of the things we can control, we have enough talent and depth to be very successful at the end of the season," Williamson said. "We have high expectations."
