News

By Ryan Schlehuber, MCC Sportswriter

Cooper Hoskins isn’t your typical college bowler. 

The Montcalm Community College freshman never had the grooming process of becoming a solid bowler through high school, suffering a lower back injury that took him out of the sport his last two years. After high school, the 2023 Fenwick High School graduate didn’t have a pathway planned for a career. 

For most of his young life, bowling wasn’t even something he loved.  

“In high school, I played soccer in the fall,” said the 19-year-old Fenwick native. “I live with my grandparents, and, back then, they said I had to pick a sport in the winter to stay out of trouble. It was either basketball or bowling, and I wasn’t going to play basketball.” 

So, Hoskins took up bowling, a sport he’d only played for fun with friends, never taking it seriously. After the club team’s first practice, however, knowing he was actually competing this time, something changed in him. 

“I don’t know. It was the combination of the feeling of the ball coming off my hand and the satisfying feeling of seeing the ball go through the pins,” he said. 

Hoskins also discovered that once he started focusing seriously on bowling, he was good at it. 

“I was naturally good at it,” Hoskins said. “That makes it easier to enjoy something, when it comes natural to you.” 

Hoskins attended a college bowl expo, and there he met with David Berry, current head coach of Montcalm Community College Centurions men and women’s bowling teams and a fellow Portland High School alumnus. 

Berry liked Hoskins immediately. 

“We had an automatic connection. From an observational standpoint, I could see he was a natural born leader,” Berry said of Hoskins. “He has a kind of intuition and good decision making. And he’s also one of those players that holds coaches accountable.” 

Berry said he was excited to have Hoskins join the team. 

“He definitely works hard and he’s determined,” he said. “I knew from what I saw at the expo that he was going to be a good one to have on the team.” 

After meeting with Berry, Hoskins knew he wanted to get back into competitive bowling, especially after missing out on his last two years in high school. 

“After taking that gap year after high school, I realized I wanted to get into competitive bowling,” Hoskins said. “I wanted to redeem myself. It was rough in high school and I never really got to finish out my accomplishments, so I thought it’d be nice to be able to do that in college.” 

Hoskins said his first bowling season with the Centurions didn’t start out like he was hoping, as he struggled a little bit out of the gate. 

“Personally, the start of the year for me was very rough,” Hoskins said. “I wasn’t in the right head space; I didn’t do the right things.” 

Then came MCC’s home invitational in Greenville Jan. 31, in which the team took second place and, for Hoskins, he won the singles competition.  

“That, I believe, was a turning point for me,” he said. 

This past week, at the MCCAA Championships in Livonia, Hoskins again performed well, as did his team.  

After five invitationals, the Centurions have finished no worse than third place, winning their first invitational in program history at Jackson College Jan. 17. Hoskins said the team has come to a point where expectations aren’t just doing its best. 

“This season, honestly, is better than we could have expected,” he said. “I feel like we’ve got four different guys that have led the team with average, so when you have six guys to a team and four are capable of leading, that’s really cool to have that much talent on our squad.” 

With each week, he and his teammates have grown more confident as a team. Before, Hoskins and his teammates just wanted to do their best at each invitational. Now, their confidence has risen to the point they are expecting to win. 

“Instead of just doing our best, we’re now saying we’re going to try and win this,” Hoskins said. “We want first now. We aren’t mad with anything less, but we’re not satisfied if we don’t get first.” 

Hoskins said this year’s team has bonded well, which has helped their success. For Hoskins, personally, having fellow Portland alumnus Jack McBride on the team as well as made things easier for him quickly. 

“I was one of the last to join the team,” he said. “Having someone you know on the team helps, but once we started practicing all together, it was really easy to mesh with this group. We’ve bonded well.” 

With the team expected to compete at nationals this year, Hoskins believes MCC has a good chance of making noise. 

“We just found out yesterday we are going to nationals,” an excited Hoskins said. “That was a big goal for the team. I think we can make a run at it if we stay cool, keep calm in our head space and execute on what we’ve worked on hard all season.”