Marsha Gilbert had a hunch. A director on the board of the Greater Central Connecticut USBC Association, she believed the women she bowled with hungered for a challenge. She just wasn’t sure how to provide it. Then she got an idea.

“My husband was a little skeptical,” Gilbert says of her husband, Tom, the proprietor of Laurel Lanes in Plainville, Conn., “but we’re always trying to come up with new leagues and different ways to build up leagues. And I knew we had a Sport league for the men, but not for the women. So I thought we’d try to start a women’s Sport bowling league.”

As she researched and changed policies for the local bowling Hall of Fame, making it possible to earn points toward Hall of Fame consideration by bowling honor scores in Sport leagues, Gilbert found only a few women bowlers who had bowled Sport leagues in the area.

“When we changed the points system for the Hall of Fame, we decided that whatever we did for the men, we wanted to do for the women,” Gilbert explains.

So she called on the experience of friends such as local league organizer and former Amateur Bowlers Tour franchise owner Denise Troy and Connecticut USBC Women’s Bowling Association President Annie Gallant. In no time, Gilbert’s dream of providing local women bowlers the same competitive opportunity that men enjoyed came closer to fruition.

“Denise and I had travelled the state for 15 years when she owned the ABT franchise, and between that and the research I did for the hall of fame, I got to know about 60 or 70 women bowlers who might be interested in a Sport league, and we sent out information and had an organizational meeting last June.”

“The Sport league a lot of people bowled last year had only two women on it,” Gallant explains. “The women feel that they are not as good or not appreciated in those leagues, so we wanted to figure out a way to get more women involved in Sport bowling.”

Today, about 50 women from around the state come to Laurel Lanes every other Sunday afternoon to bowl one of the nation’s few women’s Sport bowling leagues.

“We wanted to do it every other weekend so we weren’t taking people away from other leagues,” Gilbert says, “and also because it’s just hard for people to commit to weekly leagues these days with everything they have going on in their lives. And we wanted to make it available to any average bowler who wanted to improve their game.”

The bowlers that Gilbert’s league brings together come from more than an hour away and they come from up the street; they are in their early 20s and they are in their 70s; they average 162 and they average 210. But all of them come for the same reason: to compete on their own terms, and to have fun doing it.

“When I heard about a women’s Sport league, I definitely wanted to join up,” says league member Krista Kelly. “I feel that it’s a little more competitive because you’re bowling with your peers, and not the guys that average 230 and just blow you out of the water. That can be a little intimidating. And bowling on Sport leagues really helps me learn how to repeat shots and hit my mark more often – things I wouldn’t have to pay attention to on a house shot.”

And if bowlers find that learning curve to be a bit brutal at times, Gilbert has just the remedy for that. Every strike a bowler throws in the league earns a raffle ticket, and the league also rallies around many charitable causes such as the Susan G. Komen foundation for cancer research or local food pantries – an aspect of the league that Gilbert calls the “altruistic event.”

“It’s hard bowling on these patterns,” Gilbert says. “So we try to make it fun with the raffle and donations to charity, things like that. We donate each week, but nobody’s obligated. I sent out a list of charities we could donate to, and people have the chance to make suggestions, and then we donate to the charities that get the most votes.”

And, of course, there’s always laughter.

“Everyone gets along and they have a good time despite the fact that their scoring can be bad,” says Denise Troy. “We can laugh about it because it’s a new experience for a lot of us, and it’s been a rude awakening for a lot of us.”

If Gilbert has her way, many more women bowlers from throughout the state will soon be laughing along with them.

“Response has definitely been positive,” she says. “It’s really taking off. I have girls from other associations willing to join next year and willing to travel an hour or more to do it. Some of our bowlers travel from an hour-and-a-half away to bowl this league. I will definitely be doing this again."