With the crash of a few thousand pins, Juanita bowling recently went from a fun club to a fun club with a little more seriousness.

The Juanita girls team tied for second at the 2009 Washington State Bowling Proprietors’ Association High School Varsity Championships at Acme Bowl in Tukwila Feb. 21.

Juanita junior Weston Railton took the Boys Division II singles championship.

Bowling is a club at Juanita, not an official sport, and until this year its members have seen it as such.

“You get to bowl for free and we just did it for fun,” said Stephanie Castner, a senior on Juanita’s bowling team. “Then it turned out we were really good at it. Then we qualified for state. It was a big surprise.”

The bowling season starts in October and runs through February. The team meets three times each week, with one match on Tuesdays.

The team competed with other area teams in the same district through the regular season, and wasn’t sure what to expect heading into the state competition.

“We didn’t expect to do much,” Castner said. “We’ve been told competitions are really tough. Then we started beating teams and we were like ‘we can do this.'”

After the girls team stood in second place after the first day, the bowlers started to pick up more confidence.

The girls team ended with 35 points, tied with Shadle Park (Spokane) High School. The Rebels tallied 6,568 scratch pins.

“We came in as a big underdog,” Castner said. “In the past years we’ve always come in last and we weren’t really serious about it.”