HOWELL, NEW JERSEY---The 11th ranked St. Francis College women's bowling team concluded a tough second day at the ECAC Championships, contested at Howell Lanes in Howell, New Jersey with a seventh-place finish in the tournament. The Terriers dropped three matches to top ten teams before closing out the day with a win over Morgan State University in the seventh-place match.
St. Francis 662
The tournament schedule for Sunday called for three Quad Baker format matches before the teams were seeded for the playoff rounds. St. Francis' first scheduled opponent, Coppin State University, dropped out of the tournament unexpectedly, leaving the Terriers to open the day's action by bowling a quad Baker by themselves, strictly for pinfall. The Terriers shot games of 166-182-151-163 for a 662 total, which resulted in the team's dropping from third to fourth in the pinfall standings.
Vanderbilt 761, St. Francis 644
The second-ranked Commodores set the tone for this match with a 209-153 win in the first game and never looked back. With 644 pins for the match, St. Francis remained in fourth place in the standings, but saw their margin over fifth-place Kutztown University trimmed to 20 pins.
New Jersey City University 696, St. Francis 661
The Terriers suffered a double setback in their match with the Gothic Knights. NJCU won the first game by 48 pins, and though the Terriers trimmed the deficit to 21 pins after outscoring NJCU in both games two and three, three opens in the final four frames allowed the Gothic Knights to escape with a 35-pin victory, and dropped St. Francis into fifth place behind Kutztown in the final pinfall standings.
New Jersey City University 4, St. Francis 2
In the first playoff round, the fifth-seeded Terriers were sent right back to the lanes against the eighth-seeded Gothic Knights. NJCU won two of the first three games, before St. Francis broke the 200 mark for the first time on the day in a 211-182 game four victory. After NJCU won game five, the Terriers shot a 202 in game six but were defeated by NJCU's 219.
St. Francis 4, Morgan State 0
In the seventh-place match, both teams had difficulty in game one with the Terriers holding on for a 144-133 win. After that, St. Francis found the groove and rolled games of 200-211-203, winning each game by over 30 pins to lead to a four-game sweep in the best-of-seven match.
St. Francis will be in action next weekend at the Columbia 300/Music City Invitational, hosted by Vanderbilt University in Smyrna, Tennessee. The 20-team, three-day event commences on Friday and continues through Sunday.