MOSES LAKE — The environment is one of flashing lights and hushed conversations. To say you can hear a pin drop goes without saying, because in actuality, you can hear them banging off the walls.

Their demise is the purpose of the game and there's more than one method to the madness. There are the subtleties that go far beyond the simple fact of rolling a ball down a wooden floor. There's the oil on the alley to consider. Different types of balls generate different spin action for different purposes. Some will use one ball for strikes and another for spares. Others have different balls for different lane conditions, switching during the course of a game is not outside the scope of things. But, at the end of the day, it's not how, but how many that make the difference.

Moses Lake senior Charlene Sanislo is relatively new to the sport, having picked it up just four years ago as a freshman. But she has quickly honed her skills to be one of the best bowlers in the Columbia Basin Big Nine Conference with the top average on the Chiefs team with a 166.56.

“We hear it all the time, ‘I didn't even know that Moses Lake (High School) has a bowling team,'” she said, sitting at a table overlooking members of her team warming up before her final match at Lake Bowl.

That's to be expected in a wrestling town with a pretty fair football team. But the maroon and gold is a beautiful thing and those who wear it conduct themselves with dignity and honor.

Bowling is a game that is best understood by those who do it. There's Brooklyn strikes and Baker games. Size of the athlete isn't the measure of heart or the desire. Strength, technique, placement, precision all factor in. But the key, Sanislo said, is patience and practice.

Four years ago when she started, she was hard pressed to break 100. As the only senior in the five-girl varsity lineup, she's 70 pins better than that and has rolled over 200 on occasion. Her sisters Camille (160.83) and Kerisa (149.39) make the Chiefs girls bowling team a family affair. That's not to say Danielle Garcia (164.33) and Maddy Garza (144.38) aren't family. There's blood and there's family and when they step to the line representing Moses Lake, it's one in the same.

They celebrate the good times. They minimize the downside. They understand the work in a team sport comprised of individual efforts and they pick each other up like a seven-10 split.

Charlene has learned that attitude is everything in a game where things aren't always predictable.

“It takes a lot of work,” she said, looking out at the line of alleys as if they were answering the question for her. “You have to make it like a muscle memory thing. You have to remember how fast your ball spins to get it where you want or your hand movements when you release the ball. I've never really had any formal training. The past four years I've been working on set-up and hitting my spots … getting better.”

Life will change, as it does for all graduating seniors, but the days she wore maroon and gold and rolled for Moses Lake will always be in her heart.

Rodney Harwood can be reached at 509-765-4561 ext. 111 or businessag@columbiabasinherald.com.