...bowling alley you've ever seen? Just last week at the Illinois Coca-Cola Tournament meetings, we settled on this bowling alley we've been trying to get to make a bid for the state tournament but haven't until this year. This bowling alley is called Stardust Bowl and is in a Chicagoland suburb, Addison. We decided to check it out after we got back from the meetings to see what it was like for ourselves, and man, it was awesome. We walked in one set of doors looking straight ahead at lane 66, and when we tried to look to the left to see lane 1, we couldn't see it! This place has 84 lanes entirely across, and was very clean, and we are ecstatic to have the tournament there next year. This year's already been decided for Bloomington, as it can't always be in the same part of the state every year. Plus, we have to book them over one year in advance becuase we require the bowling alley that hosts it to provide us with an entire weekend to just the tournament (in other words, close it to the public, which bowling alleys aren't quick to do) becuase it's so huge, over 4,000 participants will have to bowl 6 games each minimum in one day, and then the finals are the next day where it becomes very formal and heavily monitored as it is for major scholarship money and will determine who goes to the Nationals as well as many who are in the Junior Olympic Gold program and may end up competing internationally. The biggest one I saw before was 80 lanes, but that place was a dump, it didn't have automatic scoring (even though I personally prefer manual scoring, for a huge tournament it's obviously required), and it was sort of separated into two buildings, where the first 54 lanes were in one building and the rest were in an adjacent building. That second building looked like it hadn't been used in years and reeked.
