Kimberly Adler

Action Shot of Kim Adler Bowling (Google Images)

My hero is Kim Adler. Kim Adler is a famous bowler who is considered one of the ten top women bowling players of all time. She has 15 National PWBA Titles, competing in 300 games from 1991- 2003. She was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in September of 1967 as Kimberly Kahrman and grew up in a neighboring town of East Longmeadow. Adler currently resides in Cocoa, Florida with her family, and is married to Tommy Adler, a paramedic. She owns 4 Element Designs, which sells her one-of-a-kind jewelry. She worked as an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) Paramedic, then continued her studies to receive her Masters in Nursing.

Reaction to Winning Shot in US Open (Google Images)

I chose Kim Adler as my hero, because she was very creative and determined. She participated in many games in her bowling career, and won a place in most of them. Her love and passion for bowling had started from a young age. I always found bowling a fun activity, but I never considered it as a passion. I enjoyed playing games at the bowling alley with my friends for parties, and I won most of them too. Kim started out in a bowling league when she was only six years old, and continued to play in her league throughout her childhood. She quit college in 1986 to pursue her dream of bowling, and took a job at her hometown bowling alley so she could practice for free. During her bowling career, her creativity led her to discover the world of jewelry making. She visited a bead store in St. Louis after a win in a PWBA tournament. While visiting the store, she made a necklace which included working with glass, and it captivated her, and made her want to keep creating different designs and to work with jewelry. She continued with jewelry, and improved her techniques even while on tour for competitions. Kim worked with jewelry and it became her obsession, so much that it affected her bowling. I’ve taken up a few extra curricular activities before, and I’ve also worked with jewelry making. I found jewelry making to be very fun, mixing and matching beads together to make patterns and creating rings and bracelets.

Kim Adler and her Glassworks Jewelry (4elementsdesigns.com)

Kim and I had things in common that made a connection between us. With her career in bowling, and staying in it for so long, then she was distracted with jewelry which set aside some of her technique in bowling. She spent time on the road and during her tour making jewelry whenever she could, and I also found myself interested in jewelry and I tried to find time to work on it. I spent most of my summer vacation making jewelry, when I realized I should be out enjoying my vacation while I had it. I also had another responsibility as Kim did to bowling, which was taking my karate classes that I had been taking for three years. I was so caught up in jewelry making, I was distracted and I wasn’t focused on my classes. I was training to become a black belt, which was a hard journey to take. A journey that would be rough and would require all my concentration, endurance and determination. I just couldn’t keep up with it, since I was so distracted. Jewelry making was not the only thing that kept me distracted. I knew that once school started, I wouldn’t have time to focus on school work and karate. I also realized that I wouldn’t be able to make it to my karate classes on time because of school and having to work on homework most of the week. Like Kim, I moved away from the world of my passion and time for karate so I could continue on with my studies in school. Although, Kim ended her career in bowling, she decided to go toward medical work; I also want to head towards a medical career in Pediatrics. We have several things in common, between Kim and me, where it was our determination to fight through our passion for our sport and our distractions which led us to realize some bigger dreams and responsibilities that we had to handle.