Mariah Joyce
Editor in Chief
While Scot Lanes may be notoriously empty many nights of the week, on Tuesday evenings you can always count on the space to be bustling with noise and (mostly) friendly competition, thanks to a bowling club started by professor of sociology Thomas Tierney.
Since the fall of 2015, Tierney and students of the College have met in Scot Lanes to bowl with adults from the Nick Amster workshop, an employment program for adults with developmental disabilities in Wayne County, Oh.
“It’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve done here,” said Tierney.
The program initially started as a component of Tierney’s First Year Seminar (FYS). The College was exploring ways to incorporate community service into FYS’s through a program called the Community Connections Program (CCP). Tierney started the bowling program with help from Meg Heller ’18, who helped organize CCP. Attendance was not mandatory, but students knew that if they wanted a study break from 7 – 8 p.m. on Tuesday nights, they could show up at Scot Lanes and bowl with adults in the community.
“I wanted a big commitment but I didn’t want to force people to be there if they didn’t want to be there,” said Tierney. “We’re dealing with a population that is sort of vulnerable and marginalized already, so the last thing I wanted to do was have students there that didn’t really want to be there and create sort of an uncomfortable environment.”
However, the numbers of attendees from Nick Amster has grown from 15 last fall to around 25 now. Tierney says there are normally eight student volunteers on any given night, some regulars and some who just stop by to see what all the fuss is about. As the program has grown and the lanes have filled up, the students have shifted from bowling with the attendees to keeping score — with the exception of those that have friendly rivalries to keep alive.
Tierney said that he had wanted to get involved with Wooster’s developmentally disabled community for years — when he first moved to the area, there was an active Special Olympics program, but the funding for those kinds of activities has since dried up.
“For years I thought about doing this because I was aware that Special Olympics had kind of waned in Wayne County — when I first moved to Wooster, it was pretty active,” said Tierney. “There were newspaper articles about powerlifters traveling internationally to compete, which I thought was pretty remarkable to have a front page article about an athlete.” Creating the bowling club was a good way to start connecting that population to the many resources at the College that they might enjoy taking advantage of.
In the future, Tierney hopes the program will expand even further — he’d love to host track meets or other events at the College, connect some of the Nick Amster attendees who enjoy powerlifting to student athletes who might want to work out with them, get students off-campus to chaperone dances or even watch their friends from Nick Amster compete in swim meets or bowling competitions.
For now, though, Tierney says it’s a rewarding experience for all involved — the Nick Amster attendees, their caregivers and the students. The students are introduced to a population they might never meet, the bowlers appreciate being accepted by and interacting with students of the College, and the bowlers’ caregivers are able to take a break, relax, and enjoy one another’s company. “They come in and interact with the college students in this fluid, funny, really kind of joyous way,” said Tierney. “It doesn’t cost really anything.”
While Tierney will be on leave next year, he is hopeful that current attendees of the program will keep it afloat, and looks forward to connecting Nick Amster with more of the College’s resources in the future. If you’re interested in some friendly competition on Tuesday nights, swing by Scot Lanes from 6:30 – 8 p.m., and bring your “A” game.