Kim Adler                                            Bowling

Kim Adler is a bit of  a non-conformist. In 11 seasons on the PWBA Tour the 34-year old Adler has known considerable success. She’s won 14 titles, been named to the WIBC All-American team three times and was runner-up for the Player of the Year Award in 1993.

But she has always tried to keep from being totally consumed by her profession.
”If all you do is bowl, and you don’t have some other kind of outlet, then eventually you will  get burned out,” Adler said. “Also, from a community standpoint, if all you have to talk about is bowling, and that’s who you are, eventually when it isn’t there, what do you have?”

Adler’s outlet from the pressures of bowling for a living is fitness. She spends her off hours snowboarding, rock climbing, or engaged in some other physical activity.
It wasn’t always easy for Adler to let go of bowling at the end of her work day.
She grew up near Springfield, Mass and started candlepin bowling virtually as  a preschooler. When she and her family moved to another part of the state where there were no candlepin lanes she switched over to tenpins. For her, bowling was a way for a shy girl to express herself.

“I was a pretty shy kid,” Adler recalls, “but because I was in the bowling center with a totally different group of people I felt I could be a different person there.”
Adler’s potential was obvious and she had success in youth and junior tournaments. She knew a little bit about the PWBA but never saw the women professionals bowl because her family didn’t have cable TV.

Eventually Adler went to Dean Junior College in Massachusetts and bowled in regional events before joining the PWBA tour in 1991 at the age of 23. “I think that’s a step some of the ladies miss when they come out now,” she said, “especially if they haven’t ben through collegiate programs. You need a middle step, I think, when you jump out to the regular tour. I think that building our (PWBA) regional programs has allowed that to happen more. It’s a needed step, you need a certain amount of knowledge that you can’t get anywhere else.”

Adler had early success, winning the Rookie of the Year honors in 1991 and the runnerup Player of the Year award two years later. She also won two titles in her first four seasons.

But mentally she was struggling. She was going through a divorce from her instructor/husband and by the summer of 1994 had all but decided to give up bowling and go back to school.

Then she met Tommy Adler and the couple has been together ever since. “He kind of relit the emotion and passion behind my bowling,” Kim says now.

As her new relationship blossomed Adler began to make time for a life away from bowling. She had always been a good athlete and had played varsity sports in high school. But for the past seven years she has mad a conscious effort to stay physically fit. Her husband travels with her regularly and the couple can often be found in the great outdoors when Adler isn’t in her “office.” Traveling by motor home, the pair may go rock climbing one week or snowboarding another. Unlike some other competitors, Adler has found that she cannot spend every waking moment in a  bowling center. “You need to have your muscle memory,” she said. “You do need to put in the hours of practice. But at a certain point for me, personally, just bowling every day, all day, is not as effective in most cases.

“If I’m working on something and the time goes by I can spend four hours or five hours in the center, easily, one day but the next day I may not feel the need to be there for the same amount of time.”

Adler won two tournaments each year from 1995-2000 before being shut out of the winner’s circle in 2001. She finished 12th on the money list with $39, 930 but was 10th on the tour in ratings points and seventh in average. She is ninth on the career earnings list with over $748,000.

Along the way Adler has become popular with television audiences. She is extremely photogenic and her blonde hair and tight-fitting outfits make an appealing combination for television cameras.

That has not always made Adler popular with her contemporaries. “Bowlers in general, they’re not chance takers,” she said. “There’s a certain community mindest per se, and when I kind of stepped outside of  that, it was a way to market bowling to other people. I don’t look like a bowler, I don’t act like a bowler in their generalized minds so it was a  way to introduce  people to the sport in a way they don’t generally look at. In a  way that was good for the sport but for me personally to step outside that realm, people were quite confused by it

”To be honest I’m not doing it for them anyway, I’m doing it for myself, so it really doesn’t matter to me what they think, personally it only affects me when they decide that maybe that my skirt should be a half inch longer.”

By her own admission Adler keeps her distance from her fellow competitors, not out of dislike but because she doesn’t feel comfortable being friendly with the people she’s trying to beat on the lanes.
“I really don’t believe in becoming great close friends with people,” Adler said, “sharing information.  I’m a pretty sensitive person, for me to be close to people  that I’m competing against would be the opposite of what I’m trying to accomplish."