In a couple of weeks, Estevan's Monique Ley will be competing with Team Canada for World 10-pin Bowling Championship for some pretty high stakes once again.
And where better to play for high stakes than Las Vegas?
Ley went to team trials in May, 2016 for the event in Vegas from Nov. 23- Dec. 5.
“I was in the top six to make the team and then in November, they added two more people to our team to have eight people,” she said. “We had a training camp in March and then we're evaluated throughout the year.”
Ley will be part of a team of six women and men who will bowl in single, double, trio and a five bowler team during the event, as well as two coaches. She got the call that she'd qualified from Jane Vetero, high performance monitoring chair.
“I was dreading that phone call for sure,” she said. “She felt I'd really been working hard throughout the past year and I deserved to go.”
Going to Vegas so soon after what happened in the mass shooting in September isn't worrying Ley, who read about one of the people from her hometown of Moose Jaw being a witness to what happened.
“It kind of touched home a bit,” she said. “It'll be crazy being down there and seeing all those crosses on the strip and everything. I don't think we'll be in any harms way. We'll just kind of go down there and do our thing and go home.”
Ley and her husband will be leaving a couple of days early ahead of the team to spend a bit of quality time there before the tournament's business will be the first thing on her mind.
“At first, I think for the first couple of days we're bowling every other day so the men are bowling one day, and then the women bowl the next day,” she said. “Then I think the remainder of the tournament things are overlapping so we're bowling every single day.”
Ley is used to it having been through this several times for long tournaments but the down time away from the alley is also invaluable.
“There's somebody on the men's team who's a good friend of mine and my coach is like 'I don't want you to be at the bowling alley watching Zach when you should be away so you don't get drained. I'm like, that makes sense. I can always watch it on the livestream and not physically be at the bowling alley.”
After a couple of days, the women's team will do some team building during one of their days off but they're not sure what it'll be.
“I'm sure we'll figure it out once we're down there and settled,” Ley said.
Ley is originally from Moose Jaw and has enjoyed the support from the community including a recent fundraiser.
“I spoke to a lot of people that have been following me since I was a kid,” she said. “It was kind of cool hearing that they still think of me and talk to my parents and my sister about how I'm doing... it's a really nice feeling being able to go home and people recognizing me.”
