While You Were Focused on Football, Kelly Kulick Rolled Herself Into History

I’m too young to remember it ever being truly popular, but I think it’s fair to say bowling has become a bit of a niche sport of late. ESPN has relegated it to Sunday afternoons, and saddled it with strange commercial after strange commercial. Today, Kelly Kulick might have changed that.Kulick won the Lumber Liquidators PBA Tournament of Champions with a 265-pin performance against 2007-08 PBA Player of the Year Chris Barnes. She also became the first woman to win a PBA Tour event. As you can imagine, she’s excited about that.

⇥“It’s been a dream of mine to win a PBA Tour event but I couldn’t have imagined it would have come in the Tournament of Champions,” Kulick said.⇥⇥...⇥

⇥⇥“I believe this can only mean bigger and better things for the sport,” she said. “If in any way this can be a boost for women sports and bowling, I’m willing to do my part. I feel like I’m on a magic carpet ride right now and I want to keep riding it higher and higher.”⇥

The question is, obviously, how should the PBA try to do that? The tournament’s final will re-air Monday night, but on ESPN Classic, and it’s not like millions were watching the event live on a day with two huge NFL games. You can watch highlights on YouTube, but they aren’t embeddable. And good luck finding free and high-quality images of Kulick, bloggers.

Perhaps the best strategy would be to get Kulick involved in social media and stage some sort of grassroots awareness campaign. After all, Terrell Owens, of all people, noticed her feat and tweeted about it; what if Oprah noticed, for example?

A little effort can go a long way in those media. And Kulick’s accomplishment deserves more than a little effort.

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