(Spirit Lake)– An event that raises money for special olympic participants in Dickinson county is coming up this Sunday, April 19th. The 15th annual Get Up and Bowl will take place at Juniper Lanes in Spirit Lake. The event was founded by Adam Eichstedt, a former Sports Director here at KUOO…
“So the story is, we were coming back from the state football semi finals, so that must have been like 2010. We stopped at, I think it was a Culvers in Fort Dodge. Clyde Ihrke and I stopped there to get some food and a bunch of other Spirit Lake fans started rolling in. One of the families was the Vierkant family, so Nancy and Jeff. I just started talking to them. I kind of had met them briefly before that. They were with their family, so for the first time I met their daughter, Megan, who is an amazing Special Olympian, and so I said, you know, I’m kind of curious because obviously Spirit Lake, Dickinson county, is not that huge of a metro area by any means. I said what is the support like, what’s the population like, for Special Olympics? She kind of filled me in. She said we’ve got a great group here, we do all these amazing things. I was just amazed to hear that. So that got me going with the idea like, okay, I’ve found my group, now what are we going to do?”
Eichstedt says it didn’t take long to figure out what that was going to be…
“I looked at Schwally one morning and we were talking about bowling on the Get Up and Go Show and it just hit me again, like that’s it. We’re going to do a bowling event for Special Olympics. So I talked to him about it, talked to a few others in the building, and next thing you know we had the Get Up and Bowl idea. Nancy and her family and the Special Olympics groups were in, it was just a matter of kind of picking a date, figuring out how we wanted to do it and getting the community behind it, which I knew they would just based on what she had told me and the way they rally around everything.”
Like most events, Get up and Bowl had a humble beginning with just 12 teams the first year. That quickly grew over the years, along with a silent auction that’s also part of the event.
Get Up and Bowl has raised an impressive $100,000 in the first 14 years.
Sunday’s event will take place from 11:00 am until 6:00 pm.
