COPYRIGHT 2023 BY YAKTRINEWS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED.
KENNEWICK, Wash. — The only thing better than one state championship is two! The high school bowling state championship tournament took place over the weekend in Tukwila, Washington. For the 4A individual competition, Kamiakin High School senior Hayden Bennett brought home gold.
But this isn’t her first time placing first at state. She’s a back-to-back state champion.
“It was like an unbelievable experience. First off, just making it and then ending up winning,” Hayden Bennett explained her 2022 win. “And then this year, I went as a team, and I was a little nervous because of the year before, and then coming back in, I was just, again, happy to be there and proud I had my team there with me.”
“Hayden deserved this. You know, it wasn't a fluke. She won it two years in a row. She worked her tail off to get where she's at,” said Kamiakin bowling coach Scott Biglin, expressing his pride for the state champion.
I asked Hayden Bennett for advice for next year’s bowling team:
“Just have fun, smile, laugh, you can take it seriously, but, you know, just be able to breathe when you go up and don't think the whole world is on your shoulders,” said Bennett.
The Kamiakin Braves bowling team also brought home third place overall.
This was their first State Championship as a team in school history, though the program is relatively new. They qualified after winning the 4A District Championship in January.
Scott Biglin said it was a great time to go in 2022, with Bennett representing the school. “To go as a team this year was even more amazing, just because we got the whole team to go, they got to hang out, you know, stay in the hotel a couple nights and just really get to know people when you hang around them,” said Biglin.
Good job to all of the bowlers who competed over the weekend!
Rylee Fitzgerald joins the KAPP/KVEW team as a multimedia journalist as her first job in journalism after graduating college. She graduated from the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University with a degree in Journalism and Media Production in May 2022.
She started her journalism career at Hanford High School in Richland where she spent four years on the Falcon Report broadcasting team. She is an ardent writer and is typically found hunched over her computer writing either her novel, or a news story. With her love for writing, and her high school experience in broadcasting, nothing made more sense than to continue studying journalism in college.
Rylee finished her degree in just three years as an ambassador for the communication college, a producer for a Cable 8 Productions series, a camera operator for CougVision, and an MMJ for Murrow News 8. She spent a summer as a news intern at our sister station, KXLY, in Spokane before her senior year at WSU.
Rylee was born and raised in Tri-Cities, and eagerly comes back home after finishing college. She has a lot of pride for eastern Washington, as it’s the only place she’s ever called home.
