A bowling lane is about 60 feet from the foul line to the head of the front pin.

The ball has to travel that distance every time, and a bowler has to put in the work every time to make sure they perform well. That is what Mexico native Kevin Duncan said he has learned in his more than 40 years of bowling and what has gotten him to the point where he is the head coach of Central Methodist’s program, which enters its second year.

“Me and Brett Fuemmeler, who is my assistant coach, we’re excited. We’re on board to get this program started,” Duncan said. “We have a solid nucleus of kids coming back, maybe one or two freshmen coming in too. We know we’ve a long road ahead of us, but it’s going to be fun.”

Duncan has no shortage of accolades when it comes to bowling. He has 65 career perfect games (300 score or 12 consecutive strikes), was inducted into the Missouri State United State Bowling Congress Hall of Fame in 2018, making him one of three Mexico natives in the club along with Wayne and Jeff Mackey, and has been a member of the Professional Bowlers Association since 2003.

People around town may recognize Duncan as a financial advisor with Edward Jones, which he said he will fully devote the same amount of time and energy to as he is still working full-time in that position. The coaching is some work he wants to do on the side as it is the next step in Duncan’s lifelong journey in the game he loves.

“My Edward Jones job is my priority, and this is something that I’m going to do outside of that,” Duncan said. “I went out to the bowling center here in Mexico (when I was 15) with a friend — his dad bowled league — so I went out and watched them and just got the bug. I got bit and have loved it ever since.”

That, of course, wouldn’t be the last time he was at the Mexico Lanes Bowling Center as Duncan said he worked part-time there since he was 18 into his early 30s. Being an employee meant Duncan could bowl for free, which meant more opportunity to practice.

Years of practice paid off for Duncan so that’s the main lesson he wants to pass along to his team.

“If you want to get good at anything, you have to practice a lot,” Duncan said. “The only way I could afford to practice was work at a bowling center. Wayne (Mackey) owned Mexico Lanes originally. Jeff Mackey’s his son and now owns it. Jeff’s my mentor, the guy who coached me when I was young. I feel like I learned a lot from him and wouldn’t have gotten (to the Hall of Fame) without his help.”

Duncan kept hitting the lanes because of his “ultra-competitive” nature, he said, as he wanted to see what he could accomplish. One of the top accomplishments in the sport is the perfect game, and while it could be thought luck plays a role, Duncan said he believes the work he has put in over the years helped him achieve perfection multiple times.

“Luck is always, in my thought, is when hard work meets opportunity,” Duncan said. “I don’t believe in luck. I think you create that. You just have to put in the work. There’s no shortcuts.”

Duncan passed on the “no shortcuts” slogan from Jillian Martin, who is the youngest woman at age 17 to win a professional bowling tournament, who said that after her victory. Having hand-eye coordination, a repeatable delivery and mental toughness is important for bowling, Duncan said, but those become better when the work ethic improves.

For Duncan, he said he checked to see how his game stacked up with others by entering one or two tournaments on the Professional Bowling Association tour every year, even though he couldn’t be full-time on the tour, so he knew exactly what he needed to work on. His team should learn similar things about themselves after each competition, he said.

“Once you get your game to a level where you feel like you’re good enough, then you got to go out and compete and see if your game is good enough,” Duncan said. “If it’s not, you go home and you work on the things that you’re not good at. If you don’t throw enough strikes, you work on your strike ball. If you’re not making spares, you work on your spares. If it’s between your ears, you work on the mental game.”

Inevitably, this all means there will be low moments during the season, so Duncan said he wants his team to not be discouraged by them. He said the expectations might not be high this year, but that is because the program is still building a foundation that should eventually lead to more success and higher expectations.

While his job as a financial advisor seems vastly different from his new one as a bowling coach, Duncan said they can be viewed similarly in that some of the advice he passes on to his clients mirrors what he will do with his players.

“A lot of what a financial advisor does is you have to be an emotions coach,” Duncan said. “The stock markets aren’t performing very well right now and times are tough and you’re constantly having those conversations with your clients to reassure them that they’re invested correctly. You keep the long-term focus.

“You’re going to be working with young kids that will have lots of ups and downs, like a stock market is. They’re going to have some emotions that are positive, they’re going to have emotions that are negative and just trying to be able to keep them emotionally balanced is kind of similar to what you do with your clients.”

Duncan said he has more work to do in his career as he said he has been a USBC bronze-certified coach for about a year and a half and will apply for his silver certification in the next six months. He said he passed a two-day test to earn his bronze certification and needs to pass another after about 12 months of training and coaching for the silver level.

For a sport that is viewed as recreational mostly, Duncan said he is excited to see how many more people, including young people, are moving into the competitive realm.

“We have a lot of amazing athletes in the sport,” Duncan said. “The best bowlers in the world are phenomenal at what they do, and I don’t think they always get credit for it. People think of bowling, I think it’s getting better, but people used to think of bowling as, you just go out, drink beer and smoke cigarettes. The image of bowling’s changing. Our top bowlers are doing that and passing it down to our kids at the college level and the high school level so I’m just excited.”