KUALA LUMPUR: World champion Natasha Mohamed Roslan never thought that her passion and talent in tenpin bowling would become the ticket to travel to almost every corner of the world, not since her mother’s intuition that bowling was up her alley.
Talking about her journey as a national athlete, Natasha, who won the women’s singles gold medal at the World Championships in Kuwait on Oct 9, said she was first called up to the national junior squad when she was 15.
According to the 2016 World Junior champion, whose mother introduced her to bowling when she was only seven, she quit after a year with the junior squad to focus on completing her schooling until the end of Form Five.
After finishing school, the 27-year-old Selangor native was selected to join the national senior squad and, since then, she has flown to dozens of countries throughout the 10 years of bearing the Malaysian flag.
“The United States (USA) is the country I have visited the most. I haven’t been to South Africa, Colombia and a few countries in Europe but, as for Asia, I’ve covered it because there aren’t many competitions in Europe; there are more in Asia,” she told Bernama here.
Natasha, who was also part of the women’s team world champions in Las Vegas, the USA in 2017, said Germany was the first country she visited after becoming a national player, and her journey there held a special memory.
She said while playing in a tournament in Germany at that time, she received her Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) exam results through a phone call from her mother, Anita Mohamad Ali.
“I remember the trip to Germany because that’s when my SPM results were released here. I asked my parents to go and collect them, and I was scared because I was afraid of getting scolded if the results weren’t good. But Alhamdulillah, the results were okay, and my parents immediately told me to focus on bowling and not to think about anything else.
“I remember this moment the most because of the time difference; I received the call at night, and my parents were happy, so I was relieved and could concentrate on bowling,” she said.
In the meantime, the fourth child of five siblings said that as for the sport of tenpin bowling, the US is the country that grips her the most due to the valuable knowledge and experience she gained there.
“Over there, when we compete in the PWBA (Professional Women’s Bowling Association), I learned a lot. They are very meticulous about the sport, for example, how they organise tournaments and take care of the players.
“During tournaments there, the coach cannot be with us, everything is between the players and the lanes, we have to learn for ourselves what our weaknesses are in every tournament some of the best players in the world are there,” said Natasha, who is the eldest daughter in the family. – BERNAMA
