NCAA Bowling Championship


The NCAA Bowling Championship is a sanctioned women's championship in college athletics. Unlike many NCAA sports, only one championship is held each season with teams from Division I, Division II, and Division III competing together. Sixteen teams, seven of them automatic qualifiers and the other nine being at-large selections, are chosen by the NCAA Bowling Committee to compete in the championships. The championship was first held in April 2004.
The most successful team is Nebraska with 5 titles. The reigning champions are Stephen F. Austin, which won the 2019 title 4 games to 1 against the defending champions Vanderbilt. This is SFA's second NCAA Bowling Championship.
Nebraska is the only program to qualify for all 16 NCAA Bowling Championships.

Format

The collegiate bowling season runs from late October through the end of March, and the National Collegiate Women's Bowling Championship is held in April.

Through 2017

The format for the championships from 2004-2017 began with qualifying rounds in which each team bowled one five-person regular team game against each of the other seven teams participating in the championship.
Teams would then be seeded for bracket play based on their qualifying rounds win-loss record and then competed in best-of-seven-games Baker matches in a double elimination tournament. In the Baker format, each of the five team members, in order, bowls one frame until a complete game is bowled. A Baker match tied 3½ games to 3½ games after seven games is decided by a tiebreaker, using the Modified Baker format, which takes the scoring from only frames 6 thru 10.

2018 and 2019

In previous years, all eight participants received at-large bids. In 2018 the NCAA Women's Bowling Committee selected a field of ten participants. Six teams are automatic qualifiers from the conferences that have been granted an automatic bid, and the other four receive at-large bids. At that time, the six conferences that fulfilled the criteria to be granted an automatic qualifier were the Division I Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, Northeast Conference, Southland Bowling League, and Southwestern Athletic Conference, plus the Division II Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association and East Coast Conference. The ten participants were ranked and seeded based on the criteria used by the selection committee. The top six seeds automatically entered the championship bracket. The four lowest-seeded teams played in on-campus opening round matches to determine the two participants advancing to the eight-team championship bracket. To minimize travel costs, the matchups were determined by geographical proximity rather than seedings.
In 2019, the championship field expanded from 10 to 12 teams, coinciding with two new conferences fulfilling the criteria for automatic qualification—the Division II Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association and the Division III Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference. Accordingly, eight conference champions received automatic bids, and the NCAA Women's Bowling Committee selected four at-large teams to fill out the 12-team field. The top four teams were seeded into the Championship bracket, while the eight remaining teams competed in four play-in matches. The winners of these matches were seeded into the eight-team championship bracket.
Qualifying rounds were eliminated in favor of a seeded double-elimination bracket. Each match within the bracket consisted of best-of-three matches using specified formats.
The championship finals were a best-of-seven match using Baker match play rules. The tiebreaker rule used through 2017 will still apply to Baker match play in the new format.

From 2020

The championship was scheduled to expand to 16 teams in 2020. The number of automatic bids was reduced by one after the MIAA bowling league disbanded at the end of the 2018–19 season. Although five schools that had participated in the final season of MIAA bowling became part of the new bowling league of the Great Lakes Valley Conference, those schools were not in the same bowling league for a sufficient time to allow the GLVC to inherit the MIAA's automatic bid.
The 2020 tournament was intended to be the first to feature regional play. The field was to be split into four regions, each with four teams competing at predetermined sites; each of the top four seeds as chosen by the NCAA selection committee would be placed in a separate regional. Each regional was to be played as a double-elimination tournament, with the format identical to that introduced for the championship event in 2019. All regional matches, except for what the NCAA calls "if necessary regional finals", are best-of-three matches bowled in the following order: five-person team, Baker total pinfall, Baker best-of-seven match play. Any "if necessary regional final" will be Baker best-of-seven. Regional winners will advance to the championship event, which will also be double-elimination. All matches will be bowled under the standard format for regionals except the championship final, which will be Baker best-of-seven.
On March 12, 2020, the NCAA announced that the 2020 tournament was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Champions

Team titles

TeamTitlesYear Won
Nebraska52004, 2005, 2009, 2013, 2015
Maryland Eastern Shore32008, 2011, 2012
Fairleigh Dickinson22006, 2010
Stephen F. Austin22016, 2019
Vanderbilt22007, 2018
McKendree12017
Sam Houston State12014

Result by school and year

28 teams have appeared in the NCAA Tournament in at least one year starting with 2004. The results for all years are shown in this table below.
The code in each cell represents the furthest the team made it in the respective tournament:
DivConfAPP04050607080910111213141516171819
School
NebraskaIIndependent16'''''
VanderbiltISouthland14''
Maryland Eastern ShoreIMEAC13'''
Central MissouriIIGLVC13
Fairleigh DickinsonINEC12''
Arkansas StateISouthland12
Sam Houston StateISouthland8'
New Jersey CityIIIAMCC7
Sacred HeartINEC6
Stephen F. AustinISouthland4''
McKendreeIIGLVC4'
Wisconsin–WhitewaterIIICIBC3
Bethune–CookmanIMEAC2
Minnesota StateIIIndependent2
Delaware StateIMEAC2
North Carolina A&TIMEAC2
Bowie StateIICIAA2
SouthernISWAC1
Winston-Salem StateIICIAA1
Fayetteville StateIICIAA1
Alabama A&MISWAC1
KutztownIIECC1
ValparaisoISouthland1
Lincoln MemorialIIECC1
Saint Francis INEC1
Texas SouthernISWAC1
Prairie View A&MISWAC1
CaldwellIIECC1
MedailleIIIAMCC1

NCAA Programs

A total of 87 teams competed in the abbreviated 2019–20 season, up from 80 teams in 2017–18 and 77 in 2016–17: