Joe Wittman watched his father carefully. Jeff Wittman would take his son with him when he was working on carpentry projects in his spare time. Joe watched and learned. He saw the craftsmanship his father put into his work and how he made the project the best it could be.
“He never cut any corners. Whatever he did rubbed off on me. Everything he did was perfect,” said Joe, a senior at Ellet High School.
Joe Wittman has mastered his own craft. In bowling, being perfect is obtainable by rolling a 300 — 12 consecutive strikes in one game. Wittman has done it seven times (three officially sanctioned) in his seven years of bowling.
One of the 300s came as part of a 763 series that led the Orangemen to the team title at the start of the high school bowling season in the Early Bird Tournament at Twin Star Lanes in Kent.
The first of the 300 games came at Bill White’s Akron Lanes when he was 13 years old and in just his third year of bowling. It came after some close calls with a 298 and a 299.
“The first one is always the hardest. When you get that close it just makes you want to get it even more. I did not worry about not getting it because I was too young,” Wittman said. “After you get the first one, you want to get the next one.”
Wittman is also proud of the 805 three-game series he rolled in a league.
Jeff Wittman, who also bowled in the 1980s, helped his son improve when he started videotaping his son’s mechanics.
“I started off bowling pretty bad. My dad started coaching me, and it took off from there,” Joe said. “I do think I am more of a natural bowler. After a while, it is like a basketball player taking a jump shot; either you have it or you don’t.”
Joe took up the sport because he is, by his own admission, a perfectionist and the type of competitor who plays to win.
“I was playing baseball and the whole team thing was making me mad because everybody was not as serious as I was. I saw bowling as an individual sport,” Joe said. “I just liked the fact that I was totally dependent on myself.”
Lonnie Kammer, Ellet’s bowling coach, thinks highly of Wittman and credits him as one of reasons the team has been good the past few seasons.
“He is a great kid and very smart. He wants to win and help the team any way he can,” Kammer said.
Wittman is a classic hard-throwing, powerball right-handed bowler. Finesse is not his forte, preferring an aggressive attitude.
“I will go out there and check out the [lane] conditions. If it is tricky, I will back it down a little,” Wittman said. “Believe it or not, it is a very mental sport. You have to stay positive.”
Joe takes honors classes and has a 3.8 grade-point average and is taking early college classes at the University of Akron. The past semester he took English, and this semester he is taking psychology as well as English. “I want to take as many college credits as I can for free,” he said.
Joe has a vision of where he is going and his ultimate goal.
“Right now I am trying to get a scholarship for bowling from a college like Notre Dame College in South Euclid. If I did not take a scholarship, I would be stupid. If that does not happen, I would look to going to Akron or Kent State so I could stay in the area and work with my brother,” he said. “I want to get some sort of business degree, maybe accounting, and be a business partner with my brother. That way I do not have to answer to somebody that I despise working for.”
His brother, Jeff Wittman, owns J & B Auto Service on Cleveland Road in Uniontown. Joe particularly enjoys working on cars. He said American engines are physically much easier to work on than foreign cars and said his best work is brake jobs.
“Everything is pretty much in the same place on every car, so it becomes routine,” he said.
When asked what is the hardest thing about working on cars, Joe quickly responded, “Patience, sometimes things just don’t go your way. You just can lose your cool. It is just like bowling — you can’t get mad or things will just get tougher for you.”
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