WPIAL
Daniel Earley Handles Adversity, Stays Busy and Hopes to Lead Hopewell Bowling to Section Title

Time is the one thing that can never be retrieved.
I’m not sure if Hopewell senior Daniel Earley lives by that motto or not but one thing is for certain, Earley is someone that doesn’t waste any time and is as active of a kid as you’ll find.
Whether it’s with his academics, his job, hobbies or the many sports he participates in, Earley is doing something.
“I just have to say busy; I can’t sit still,” Earley tells Vikings Sports Now. “Sometimes it hurts me because sometimes I’m trying to do two sports seasons at once, but I have to be active and can’t sit still. Growing up, whenever there was a sport to sign up for, I’d do it. I’d do baseball, basketball, track, cross country, whatever. Mr. (Don) Short used to call me ‘The Jack of All Trades’ because I’d be in the athletic office for everything. I like to be versatile and active; I can’t sit still.”
Earley’s sport of the month currently is competing with the Hopewell Vikings Bowling Team and they’re one win away from something special. The Vikings are currently 7-0 and if they’re able to win their next match against 2nd place Montour, the Vikings would win a section championship for the first time since 2014. That match was supposed to take place today but has been moved due to school being postponed.
Earley is the captain of this team, which is something that he takes pride in. Daniel is the second ranked player in the section and is the first bowler at Hopewell to have a shot at 300 in the 10th in at least a decade and is 3 pins off the school record.
When I talked to Earley about this success, it’s not surprising that he instead focused on the team improvement and his head coach Stan Magusiak.
“When I joined the team, I was the only freshman on the bowling team, it was a different program and had a different coach,” said Earley. “With 4 seniors on the team, we were co-section champions. The team struggled during my sophomore season. Then during my junior season, a bunch of kids wanted to sign up for bowling and we were able to have a really nice five going but we were young. Although we didn’t win as much as we probably could have, we developed some chemistry which has carried into this season. This team has been amazing. We’ve all jumped our averages a bunch, by 20 and 10 pins.”
“We hit a plateau during my sophomore and junior seasons and things have skyrocketed up this year, which is so rewarding. Going out and beating teams that we’ve struggled to beat in the past. Montour is so hard to beat and although it was a struggle to do so this year, we were able to beat them. Now we’re going to try and do that again, which is going to be hard, but if we want the section championship, we have to do it.”
It’s not easy to make the jump that a lot of bowlers on this team have done but Earley believes they’ve done so because of hard work and more importantly because of their head coach.
“Repetition, how we look at things and how we practice,” said Earley. “In the past during practice, it would be ‘let’s just go bowl’, we weren’t really working on anything in particular. Now with Coach Stan, my junior and senior year, we go into practice and now look at 10 pins today, we’re looking at strikes today, we’re looking at this pattern today. We’re actually trying to dissect what we want to do, things like that. It’s not like bowling is a club anymore, it’s an actual sport and we’re taking it serious, and the results have shown.”
“I’ve known him since I was in 5th grade because I did the Saturday Bowling League at Sheffield Lanes. His son, Brayden, has always been on my team and Coach Stan was there every Saturday. My family and Coach Stan’s family are really good friends. For him to coach and start coaching the high school team my junior season for me was awesome because he was a familiar face, and he really took pride in being our coach. He enjoys bowling, he bowls and really understands the sport. He takes pride in the sport and really treats us like athletes, not how some people think bowling isn’t a sport, which is awesome. I play a bunch of other sports, basketball, cross country, track and I come with that same competitive mindset into bowling and it’s not like it’s just bowling, I’m not here to win. Coach brings that same attitude and brings it to the whole team. He brings the intensity to a sport that you wouldn’t think would have that much intensity.”
During our conversation, Earley was talking about the different sports that he’s participated in, so I asked him, over the years, what has been your favorite sport to compete in?
“I think Track and Field. Playing pickup basketball is the greatest but organized basketball is different,” said Earley. “I like Track the best because there’s so much you can compete in. If you’re not good in one event, you can do other ones. In track, I jump and also run, so I’m not stuck to one thing. Also, I love Track because of Coach Brunton. I love him, he just makes track so much fun. You actually enjoy going there because of him.”
Being so active in his young life has caused Daniel to go through some physical adversities as he’s suffered multiple concussions and last year had to undergo double hip surgery. That serious operation forced him to miss most of his junior in athletics but he’s back and as he tells me ‘Feeling better than ever’.
Now before he starts track and field in the spring, Earley has a chance to end his bowling career at Hopewell on a high with a section championship.
“It would be nice for me to end on a boom, said Earley. “But it would also open the opportunity for other kids in Hopewell to come in and continue the dominance of Hopewell bowling. I really think that we can be a program like Montour in the upcoming years because we have a lot of young, talented kids on JV that are getting better every week. If you’re a student in the school and see and hear that they just won the section, it might make kids want to sign up because they might want to become part of something that’s winning and that’s something we should take pride in.”
