The Indiana/Ilinois Youth Scholarship Bowlers Tour (IYSBT) is one of the premier youth bowling tournaments in the country and have been providing monthly tournaments around the state of Indiana since 2002. This year we will be expanding to 30 tournaments held in both Indiana and Illinois. Please click on our schedule page for a complete list of tournaments and dates.
Our mission (purpose) of the tour is multifaceted.
The first purpose is to create a tour for "scratch youth bowlers" to earn scholarship (SMART Fund) money.
The second purpose is to give youth bowlers multiple opportunities to earn their spots for the Junior Gold National Championships.
The third purpose is to prepare youth bowlers for the challenging "Sport Conditions" used by Junior Gold, North Pointe, Youth Open, Teen Masters and college bowling. Those of you how have bowled our events over the years know that we probably put out the toughest shots possible.
Another purpose of the tour is not to have it so that it is easy for the younger bowlers to earn scholarship money. It also isn’t the purpose for older youth bowlers to earn scholarship money. The tour is designed so that the best bowlers that particular Sunday would win scholarship money no matter what their age. Over the years we have young bowlers win and we've had older bowlers win. We've had bowlers dominate for a year but we've never had a bowler dominate year after year. Circumstances arise in every bowlers life (personal, school, jobs, etc...) that distract them from putting into what is needed to dominate year after year. Even if that were to happen, we will not discriminate against that bowler for working on their game. Instead we would encourage other bowlers to work harder in order to compete with that bowler.
As stated in the first paragraph this is a "youth scholarship" bowlers tour. In the beginning a youth could be a youth bowler until they were 23 (depending on when their birthday fell). This past year the USBC decided to mess (for lack of a better word) with the term youth and take away 3-4 years of youth bowling away from some of our bowlers. In our IYSBT Town Hall meeting held in Brownsburg, Indiana this past spring it was decided that we would not only stick with the old age limit but raise it to 25 to help those still in college. The new rules that we put into place state that a bowler must attend college and take only SMART funds.
We do not take expenses of any kind out of the Bowlers entry fee, in fact all but the lineage costs ($14/bowler) go directly back into the prize fund for that day! Come bowl one of our events and see why we are one of the best Scholarship Tours in the country.
