Girl of the greens

Andrew Mathieson
“BOWLS babe” sounds a little too conceited still for Samantha Shannahan’s liking.
The tag also isn’t what most onlookers associate with the genteel sport’s standout competitors.
The usual concept is long white skirts, cucumber sandwiches and old men drinking beers alongside bowling greens.
But modest Samantha says she’s just like most 19-year-olds.
The Lara girl attends university full-time, works part-time for pocket money and now poses at photo shoots for glamour magazines.
The self-confessed Coles “checkout chick” was recently named in Alpha magazine’s “Hot 20” most beautiful Australian sports women, a title she acknowledges with a nervous chuckle.
“I just don’t see myself in that magazine,” she grins.
“They rang up Bowls Australia and asked whether it had anyone in mind who could do it and I got dobbed in.”
Samantha was still 17 when the glossy lads’ sports publication sought permission for the shoot from mum.
“I’m not wearing a bikini,” Samantha immediately told mum Andrea.
The magazine was happy to pick out a slick black number more akin to her Geelong High School formal than on the greens.
Alpha instead dressed Samantha in an evening dress, gave her a running sheet beforehand and she was soon on set mixing it with swimmer Liesel Jones.
“This doesn’t happen to a Lara girl,” Samantha grins.
Bowls runs in the Shannahan family. Grandfather Ralph introduced Samantha’s twin brother, Jesse, to the game at just 13, a year before her own initiation.
“His mates didn’t even know he was playing at first,” Andrea says.
“There was a stigma.”
Jesse can still be spotted on the Lara greens and often plays bowls incognito – no whites, just a hoodie pulled over his head.
“He tries to be normal,” Samantha says while watching her twin bowl.
Jesse sneaks back inside the Lara clubroom and whispers his score of 116 to mum.
“I really didn’t even know bowls existed until Jesse started playing,” Samantha remarks.
“Then I realised it wasn’t just an old person’s game.”
In her first tournament, Samantha finished equal third in the under-18 girls’ state singles titles, earning automatic elevation into a Victorian squad.
A champion of the game was born, even though the teen still reckons she’s just an “average” bowler.
“I didn’t really feel any pressure or anything because I didn’t ever have any expectations,” she explains.
“It was just fun for me, then I won and it was just a bonus.”
Samantha just as abruptly entered the Australian senior team in March as one of best 10 female bowlers in the country and the second youngest of the group.
Now she’s jumped the gender divide to rub shoulders with the elite men in the state division one pennant competition for Altona.
Not all the men like it, either. They’re too polite for onfield sledging but their cold stares tell Samantha another story.
“Most of the men, even though I could be of a higher standard than them, don’t like the idea about playing against women,” she observes.
Andrea adds that some competitions will even ban her daughter from playing.
“Sometimes that’s just an old stickler who doesn’t like change,” Andrea smiles.
“But if Samantha didn’t love it as much, she would have thrown it away because there is forever hurdles.”
Samantha is serious enough to be aiming for women’s competition at the 2010 Commonwealth Games.
Training drills, fitness sessions, sports psychologists and studying tactics all accompany the sport, which has also given Samantha exposure on national television.
“I don’t like watching it and the commentators telling me off,” she laughs.