Kevin Farner is in his second year at Oberlin College as the Campus Recreation Coordinator and the only full-time employee of College Lanes, Oberlin’s on-campus bowling alley. In his role, Farner is responsible for the daily operations of College Lanes as well as the organization of all College-sanctioned outdoor recreation trips, many of which take place off campus. Additionally, Farner teaches beginner and intermediate bowling classes through the College — ATHL 144 (Bowling I) and ATHL 244 (Bowling II).

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Have you been involved with bowling long before your time at Oberlin?

Yes. I bowled my first league when I was eight years old. I bought a bowling center near Buffalo, NY, in 1995, which my wife and I ran for about 23 years. I sold it in 2018 when she had some health problems. After that, I worked for a big bowling center in New York. Before I came to Oberlin, I spent my last three years running a bowling center on an Air Force base in Little Rock, AR. 

What lessons have you learned throughout your career in bowling that have helped you at Oberlin, especially going from working with the Air Force to now working with college kids? It seems like a big jump.

The young people who enroll in the Air Force are a lot like all of you who enroll in college. You’re many miles away from home, and you need a place to go where you feel welcome and wanted, to see a friendly face that’s there to take care of you. I wouldn’t be needed at the College if it wasn’t for students wanting to use the lanes. So I want to show students that I appreciate that, and want to make them feel wanted. From the sports side of it, I’ve been around bowling so long, and I’m a bowling nerd. So I’ve done some coaching and teaching, and I just like to pass my knowledge along to the next generation.

How has it been teaching classes here at Oberlin? Has that been any different for you than teaching previously?

Yes and no. When I ran the little bowling center, I had a youth league, so I started teaching kids from ages six all the way through high school. Then I kind of fell into the role of being the local high school bowling coach, and I spent 12 years doing that. You guys are a little bit older than the students that I taught before, so I feel like you ask maybe a little bit more in-depth questions than the kids. So I love working with the Oberlin students because you’re all an inquisitive bunch. It would be the worst thing as a coach or as a teacher to run a class and not have anybody ask you a single question. During my class today, I was getting quizzed on a lot of different areas, so it’s just fun to see everybody wanting to learn about it and develop their skills.

What do you think has been a big lesson that you’ve been able to share with the students at Oberlin that you’ve learned throughout your career?

I was a sports player all through my youth and I feel like there’s a lot of life lessons in our sports. When I coached, I took it a little too seriously. But I really wanted to teach the kids the value of learning to win or lose with grace, and to handle adversity. Because we have bad days in life and we have bad days in our sports. And generally, getting upset does not help make it better. So, you just have to learn to calm yourself down and work through the process of going back to the basics and the fundamentals to make you better. Being around bowling my whole life, sometimes I learned lessons the hard way. Hopefully, I can take some of that knowledge and teach it to the next generation.

How do you think that you’ve been able to transition that lesson in bowling to other facets of your life and also the way that you’re teaching your students and your players? 

I feel like in life, we all have bad days at work. And when you’re having a bad day, you have to just remind yourself that this isn’t going to last forever. This is a small event. And if something goes wrong, there’s probably a lesson for me to learn here. What am I going to get out of this? What am I going to get out of this to make me a better person and make it easier to deal with it the next time?

What are the things that you strive for in your work on a day-to-day basis, but also overall working at the College? 

I just want to make it fun for all of you guys to have a fun place for you to go. But from the competitive side, I would love to see Oberlin get back into competitive bowling. Get a club bowling team going, or even possibly get a varsity bowling team going here at some point.

So, anything that I could do to help make that happen, I would be glad to do.