Fayetteville bowler from Westover is state champ — with hopes of going higher
Dykashie “Kash” Harris, a 16-year-old at Westover High School, said that when he was 3, his mother got him a set of bowling pins and a Spider-Man bowling ball.
Their house on West Mountain Drive had a long hallway. For Kash, bowling was a perfect pastime.
He said he would bowl for hours at a time: “I would just do the form and throw it down there. I just fell in love with bowling. ”
His mother Tiffany Harris remembers. She laughed: “That’s where it all started. That one little set of Family Dollar bowling pins and a plastic Spider-Man bowling ball.”
Kash, a sophomore, is now North Carolina’s high school state bowling champion. He won the title in February at the Sandhills Bowling Center in Aberdeen.
“I was in a zone,” he says. “I wasn’t worried about anything else. I was worried about, ‘What can I do (on) the next shot?’”
In June, Kash and his family will travel to Beavercreek, Ohio, near Dayton, to play in the national competition.
Big win as a third-grader
Kash says he can remember his first big win like it was yesterday. His military family was stationed in Fort Lee, Virginia, at the time. He was in third grade, and in the final match, he faced a high school freshman.
By then, Kash was already looking up to players much older and more experienced.
“I looked up to a lot of people because I wanted to beat them,” he says. “I was really competitive. As I was looking up to them, I improved my game. It would always drive me to do better for myself and to be the best that I can be.”
“I needed like eight pins to win,” he says. “And I just threw it. At that time, I really didn’t, like, really have a form. But I was so competitive I made it look good.”
He did not realize he had won until the other player told him.
“I was so happy, I got on my knees and said, ‘Yes!’" he says now with a broad grin.
He hugged his mom in the excitement.
Tiffany Harris remembers that it was a very long day at the lanes.
“I was ready to go,” she says with a laugh.
But Kash says he knew from that moment he wanted to go further, get better.
Grownups he knew at alleys around town helped him improve.
“I finally knew how to curve the ball, I knew how to be consistent,” he says. “They gave me tips on how to be a better spare shooter.”
As a 10- and 11-year-old, he won back-to-back youth titles in the Appomattox River tournament.
Since then, Kash has continued to earn honors and trophies.
Among them: He usually qualifies for the Junior Gold tournament that brings together top bowlers from across the country; he will compete in Indianapolis later this year.
He also bowls with the North Carolina all-stars team that competes against Georgia and South Carolina teams and posted victories the last two years over the other states. In 2020, he and Desmond Smith, also of Fayetteville — the younger brother of NBA basketball player Dennis Smith — won the state title as doubles.
Kash wants to eventually turn professional. He bowls three to four times a week, and he and his mom stay on the road.
“It’s more like year-round,” he says. “You’ll probably see me in a tournament a good two to three times a month.”
Just breathe
Still, Kash almost missed the cut for the high school state tournament that he would go on to win. He finished 11th in the county tournament, the last available slot.
“I was doing all right for the first two games,” he says. “It was just messy for the last game, and I was so mad. I was missing a lot of spares and I was letting it get to me.
“I always say don’t let one shot affect how you do the rest of the time.”
He says he has to talk to himself before he sends the ball down the lane.
He says he tells himself: “I can do this. I just gotta take it one shot, one frame at a time, and just breathe.”
The latter advice he gets from his father, Nakwon Harris: “Breathe.”
“Don’t rush it,” Kash says. “Just go with the flow. Adjust when I need to. And just be myself.”
In Aberdeen, his game came back together — and how.
“It was beautiful,” he says of his play through the first three games in state tournament, which was held Feb. 17. “I never bowled that good in my life.”
Many of his friends from other schools showed up to cheer him on. He bowled a 278 in one of the games, just 10 shy of his best score of 288.
“I was working off the energy,” he says.
In the final, which he won 230 to 199, he beat Alex Schenk, a talented senior at Terry Sanford High. The two are good friends and fellow bowlers in the Late Risers League at B&B Bowling Lanes on Fort Bragg Road.
Kash describes the day in Aberdeen: “It was too perfect. It was just a great time.”
A bowling family
Kash’s demeanor is calm and easygoing. At Westover, he is an honor roll student enrolled in the engineering program.
He comes from a bowling family. He learned a lot from his granddad, Frank Breece, who he calls Papa.
“He was killing it,” Kash says of Papa’s bowling skills.
Asked if he had passed the older gentleman in bowling, he demurred; Papa, who was listening in on the interview, laughed the idea off; Tiffany Harris said it had been a long time since her father and son had played against each other.
Some of Kash’s earliest victories were alongside his mother; they played doubles competitively at lanes on Fort Bragg.
Tiffany Harris says theirs is a bowling family.
“We bowl,” says Harris, who said her brother also bowls. “We love bowling.”
Kash has advice for any younger players who want to learn the game.
“All I gotta say is don’t ever give up on something,” he said. “Even if you do bad on something, just take it as a learning lesson and keep improving.”
Myron B. Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3559.
This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Fayetteville bowler from Westover is NC champ and hopes to go higher
