Nineteen teams qualified for the 2025 National Collegiate Women’s Bowling Championship, which gets underway on Thursday, April 3. Two of them are led by head coaches who also have careers in harness racing.
Jeff Zidek, who has worked at Hollywood Casino at The Meadows in either part-time or full-time roles since 1987, is the head coach of St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. He is the only coach in the history of the program, which began in 2017.
Angela Reynolds, who has worked at Mohegan Pennsylvania’s Pocono Downs in various roles since 2007, is the head coach of Kutztown University. A standout during her own collegiate bowling days at Delaware State University, Reynolds took over the Kutztown program in 2019.
Both Zidek and Reynolds are leading a team to the National Collegiate Women’s Bowling Championship for the first time. The tournament is notable in that programs from NCAA Division I, Division II and Division III compete together. St. Vincent is a Division III school while Kutztown is Division II.
In the most recent National Tenpin Coaches Association Division II/Division III rankings, Kutztown was No. 6 and St. Vincent was No. 7.
“Who would think that in our sport of harness racing you’d have a couple of people tied into a totally different sport in the same way as coaches?” said Zidek, who since 2019 has worked fulltime at The Meadows as the track’s announcer.
“To go from racing horses to bowling, you don’t hear about that every day,” said Reynolds, who is the medication documentarian at Pocono Downs in addition to assisting in other administrative capacities and being a licensed charter. “It’s cool.”
St. Vincent received an automatic bid to the national tournament as the champion of the Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference, with Zidek garnering AMCC Coach of the Year honours for the third time in his career. The Bearcats will travel to the Rochester (New York) Regional to face Marian University in their single-elimination opener.
The winner will advance to meet Youngstown State, the tourney’s overall No. 3 seed, in the start of the double-elimination regional round on Friday. The four regional winners will head to the finals round on April 11-12 in Las Vegas.
“Once you make an NCAA national tournament, no matter what happens, no one can ever take that away from you,” said Zidek. “And the percentage of athletes that get to say in life that they made an NCAA tournament is very small. And they’ve done it. No matter what happens this week, it’s always going to be something they can hang their hat on.”
Zidek, a 1990 St. Vincent graduate who served as the college’s sports information director from 2003-2019, has compiled a 300-75 record with the Bearcats. The team is 49-17 this season as it heads into Thursday’s action.
“I’ve tried to build my program with athletes good enough to go Division I but choose to focus more on the academic side,” said Zidek. “I’ve been able to find enough athletes to buy into that philosophy that could have gone to larger programs. I will travel everywhere I can to try to find the diamond in the rough.
“I enjoy that part of it because, the thing is, you do change their lives. I have brought students here from a couple thousand miles away and some of them stay, they ended up living and working in Pennsylvania. You look at those situations and you try to do what you can to benefit them as not just athletes but as students and help them move on with their life after this. I’ve had good luck with that.”
Zidek has been bowling since the age of seven. In addition to winning individual and doubles tournaments in western Pennsylvania, he has thrown multiple perfect games in his career. He continues to bowl weekly in area leagues and tournaments and has consistently averaged 215 over the past 15 years.
“The NCAA does not have men’s bowling, it’s just a women’s sport,” said Zidek. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to start the program, because I never got the chance to bowl in college. Women’s college bowling had been picking up. When the college made the decision to add it, I saw an opportunity for me to do something a little different. The time was right for me.”
Kutztown received an automatic bid to the national tournament as the champion of the East Coast Conference, with Reynolds earning her first ECC Coach of the Year honour. The Golden Bears will travel to the Pittsburgh Regional to face Fayetteville State in their single-elimination opener.
The winner will advance to meet Nebraska, the tourney’s overall No. 2 seed, in the start of the double-elimination regional round.
Kutztown will bring a 63-43 record into Thursday’s match.
“It’s so cool just to get the bid to go,” said Reynolds. “Yes, we’re worried about Thursday, we want to get through that match first, but we’re so excited just to go and be a team and be united. This is the first time in the school’s history that they’ve won an ECC championship. You have your ups and downs every year, but they that was the only goal we had all year, and they worked hard and came together so well.
“If we wouldn’t have won, I still would have been so proud of them because of the growth they showed in everything; team bonding, team unity. There was more than just bowling going on. The support they provided for their teammates, it could bring a tear to your eye. It was amazing.”
Reynolds, a 2012 graduate of Delaware State, was a three-time National Tenpin Coaches Association All-American for the Hornets. She participated in the national tournament twice and helped Delaware State to the semifinals in 2009.
“Back then, it was the top eight got picked,” said Reynolds. “It’s a mental game. I can prepare them a little bit for what’s going to happen, but it’s still so much different from when I was there.”
Kutztown University is nearly 90 minutes from Reynolds’ home in northeast Pennsylvania, and it’s another half-hour to the bowling center. But the travel is a small price to pay for Reynolds to remain connected to the sport and its athletes in a special way.
“Kim Terrell-Kearney was my coach at Delaware State and I loved everything about her,” said Reynolds. “She was a total mentor. I hung on every word she said and her word was gold. I thought if she could change my life so much, what can I do for others?
“I enjoy the girls and teaching the sport that I love, just passing on everything I have to younger generations. I think it’s a great sport.”
(USTA; photo of Angela Reynolds and Jeff Zidek)