Yes, the ultimate fantasy sport, bowling

The hobby has expanded well beyond the gridiron

By Diego Vasquez

Now’s the time of year that fantasy football geeks love. The NFL is in the middle of its preseason, and fantasy team owners all over are crunching numbers and scouring the injury reports in hopes of putting together a team that will bring home the hardware at the end of the season.

Fantasy football is huge, but fantasy sports as a whole have expanded over the last few years, and dramatically. They now include such not-so-mainstream yet super-with-it sports as Formula 1 racing, English Premiership soccer and golf.

But can you imagine spending hours researching, say, bowling statistics for a fantasy PBA bowling league?

Well, chalk up your mitts. Lots of people would, and one of them is Rick Morris, senior editor of DraftHelp.com, a web site dedicated to fantasy sports. Among other things, Morris is the site’s main hockey contributor and also writes about sports that fit into the Other Sports category, like bowling.

“We’ve been giving advice on league formats since the beginning,” he says. “With niche sports, we’re looking at how to go about this.”
On his site Morris proposes a scoring system for a fantasy bowling league and even ranks his top 30 PBA professionals. Forty-time tournament winner Walter Ray Williams, Jr. was the No. 1 player for 2005.

The PBA’s official site doesn’t have its own fantasy league to join quite yet, but it would be wise if it did soon, according to Morris.
“It’s one more way to hook the fan base in [so it can] follow your product even more,” he says.

Morris says the internet, particularly broadband, has helped increase the popularity of fantasy sports because participants can check stats in the blink of an eye. “It makes it less demanding, and people don’t want their hobbies that demanding."

The most popular fantasy sports sites are ones that offer leagues for a variety of different sports and have the capability to track stats in-depth and quickly so fans can easily check on their teams’ status.

With 4.37 million visitors, FantasySports.Yahoo.com was the most popular fantasy sports site in July, according to comScore Networks. And that number, of course, has risen as the NFL season approaches. In May slightly fewer than 3 million people visited the site, and that jumped to 3.96 million in June.

Yahoo offers fantasy leagues for the four major sports as well as ones for NASCAR and Formula 1 racing, PGA golf and six different soccer leagues. Though smaller sports are now starting to gain popularity where fantasy games are concerned, football is still the clear No. 1.

“Fantasy football is the game for the masses, and fantasy baseball is more for the hardcore,” says Morris. “More people play fantasy football, but a much bigger percentage of people [who play] are consumed by fantasy baseball.”

Morris says it’s not unheard of for high-rolling fantasy baseball players to travel down to Florida for spring training so they can scout baseball players for their fantasy leagues themselves.
Maybe it’s only a matter of time before fantasy geeks start seeking out the next Walter Ray Williams, Jr. too.

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