Bowling is not the first thing that comes to mind when people think of Missoula, Montana, but it’s one of the city’s many hidden gems.
West Side Lanes (West Side), founded in 1983 on Wyoming St, is the only bowling alley in Missoula. They host Christmas parties for companies, birthday parties for kids, and the most important part is that adult and youth leagues run throughout the week.
Leagues can be played for fun with a group of two or more friends or for competitive reasons. There is an evening league, a senior league, and a youth league. Both the evening and senior leagues have multiple sub-leagues within them, but the most important league they offer has to be the youth leagues.
Youth League
Like the adult leagues, West Side offers multiple youth leagues with their own Roll and Grow, U12, and U18.
Roll and Grow is for kids younger than age seven, and according to Peri, league director and manager of West Side, there have been kids as young as two and a half.
U12 consists of kids ages 7-12; U18 consists of kids 13-18. After kids turn 19, they can start playing in the evening leagues.
All three of the leagues play on Saturday at 10AM and go until everyone on each team bowls a series, which is three games. A game is made up of ten frames. Kids who are in any of the leagues pay $15-$20 for a season, and then there is a $13 weekly fee.
The season goes for 21 weeks for the Roll and Grow group and 22 of U12 and U18 groups. Within the seas, there are three tournaments that kids can choose to participate in, but it’s not mandatory for anyone. There is also a state tournament that kids don’t have to qualify for, but can play in if they want to.
This year, three kids from the youth leagues are going to the state. The only tournament that kids have to qualify for is any of the youth national tournaments. This year, all three national youth tournaments are being played in different cities in Minnesota.
Fisher Kennard
Fisher Kennard is a freshman at Sentinel High School. He does photography for the school’s newspaper, The Spartan Scoop. He’s on the Tennis team, and most interestingly, he is an avid bowler for West Side U18.
Kennard has been bowling since he was seven years old, and even though he didn’t do it every day or every week, he went consistently enough that youth leagues began to interest him.
He first joined the youth leagues in 2022. Back then, he was young enough to be a part of the U12 team. After that season, he took a three-year hiatus because he was “busy with other sports and [had] gotten bored [of bowling]”.
Even though Kennard left the league because he had lost interest in the sport, his time away actually rekindled his fire.
A few months before the 2025-2026 youth league season started, Kennard was thinking about going back. He had “really missed bowling”, and he “knew a lot of people who bowled there”. By some fate, he had found one of his old bowling balls and instantly thought, “I need to go bowling again”.
After a quick and encouraging conversation with his dad, he rejoined the youth league, and because he was over the age of 12, he was put in the U18 league.
Kennard did well in the league this year, bowling multiple personal records on an eight-pin skittle game and a regular game. An eight-pin skittle game is when the lane has only eight pins. On top of that, he had a score of 271 pins, only 29 pins away from a perfect game of 300 pins. In a regular game of ten pins, his top score is 225 pins, which is still only 75 pins away from a perfect game.
Even though bowling is not the most popular sport for kids, it can be one of the best ones for them. Peri sees the kids who did youth league growing up continue to bowl throughout their lives in adult leagues. Kennard can attest to how beneficial youth leagues can be by the number of friends he has made through them.
Youth leagues will start back up for the 2026-2027 youth season in September and run until the start of February. If anyone is interested in joining, they can call or visit West Side Lanes to learn more about the league.
