Jason Couch (born November 8, 1969) is a ten-pin bowler on the

Professional Bowlers Association The Professional Bowlers Association (PBA) is the major sanctioning body for the sport of professional ten-pin bowling in the United States. Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, the PBA membership consists of over 3,000 members worldwide. Member ...

(PBA) Tour, and a member of the PBA and USBC Halls of Fame. A left-handed cranker, Couch graduated from Clermont High School in

Clermont, Florida Clermont is a city in Lake County in central Florida, United States, about west of Orlando and southeast of Leesburg. The population was 43,021 in 2020. The city is residential in character and its economy is centered in retail trade, lodging, ...

and still resides in Clermont. He owns 16

PBA Tour The PBA Tour is the major professional tour for ten-pin bowling, operated by the Professional Bowlers Association. Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, over 3,000 members worldwide make up the PBA. While most of the PBA members are Regional profess ...

titles, including four major championships, plus one title on the PBA50 Tour.

PBA career

Couch joined the PBA in 1991. In his first full season (1992), he won PBA Rookie of the Year honors. Jason's first title came at the 1993 Tums Classic, defeating

Brian Voss Brian Voss (born August 4, 1958) of Cornelius, North Carolina, is a professional ten-pin bowler and member of the Professional Bowlers Association since 1982. The right-hander owns 25 PBA Tour titles (11th all-time), including one major champion ...

in the final match. Later that year he won his first major title at the 1993 Touring Players Championship. After four more titles between 1995 and 1999, Couch pulled off an historic "three-peat" in the Tournament of Champions, winning consecutive events in 1999, 2000 and 2002. (The event was not contested in 2001 because the PBA switched from a calendar year to a fall-spring seasonal format.) Couch's 14th and 15th career titles came in back-to-back events in 2007, the first and only time he had done this in his career. After a four-year drought, he won his 16th and final PBA Tour title at the 2011

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Plastic Ball Championship, an event where players were limited to only two older-technology plastic bowling balls for the entire tournament. Couch earned over $1.7 million over his PBA Tour career. He had season-ending knee surgery in 2007 and had to defer his 2007–08 exemption to 2008–09. He was ranked #24 on the PBA's 2008–09 list of "50 Greatest Players of the Last 50 Years." Through the end of the 2010–11 season, Jason had recorded 41 perfect 300 games in PBA events. In February, 2012, he was elected to the PBA Hall of Fame. Also in 2012, Couch announced his retirement from full-time competitive bowling on the PBA Tour, although he continued to have a role on the tour as a ball representative for

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and as current manager of the Philadelphia Hitmen PBA League team. Couch joined the PBA50 Tour in 2020, only to have the season canceled due to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

. He won the second event of the 2021 season, the

Johnny Petraglia John Petraglia Sr. (born March 3, 1947) is an American professional bowler. He is a member of the Professional Bowlers Association (PBA), where he won 14 PBA Tour titles. He has also won eight PBA Senior Tour titles. He is a member of both the P ...

BVL Open, for his first PBA50 Tour title.

PBA Tour titles

Major championships are in bold text. # 1993 Tums Classic (

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)
# 1993 Touring Players Championship (

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Indiana Indiana () is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th s ...

)
# 1995 ''Bowlers Journal'' Classic (

Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania Mechanicsburg is a borough in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. The borough is eight miles (13 km) west of Harrisburg. It is part of the Harrisburg–Carlisle metropolitan statistical area. As of the 2010 census it had a population of 8,981. ...

)
# 1995 Indianapolis Open (Indianapolis, Indiana)
# 1998 Showboat Invitational (

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)
# 1999 Bay City Classic (

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)
# 1999 Brunswick World Tournament of Champions (

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)
# 2000 Brunswick World Tournament of Champions (

Lake Zurich, Illinois Lake Zurich is a village in Lake County, Illinois, United States, a northwest suburb of Chicago. Per the 2020 census, the population was 19,759. The village is named after a body of water named "Lake Zurich," which is completely located insid ...

)
# 2001 The Villages PBA Open (

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)
# 2002 PBA Tournament of Champions at Mohegan Sun (

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)
# 2003 PBA Pepsi Open (

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)
# 2005 Chicago Classic (

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)
# 2006 Dick Weber Open (

Fountain Valley, California Fountain Valley is a suburban city in Orange County, California. The population was 57,047 at the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census. History The area encompassing Fountain Valley was originally inhabited by the Tongva people. Europea ...

)
# 2007 Dick Weber Open (Fountain Valley, California)
# 2007 Motel 6 Classic (

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)
# 2011 Mark Roth Plastic Ball Championship (

Cheektowaga, New York Cheektowaga () is a town in Erie County, New York, United States. As of the 2020 census, the town has grown to a population of 89,877. The town is in the north-central part of the county, and is an inner ring suburb of Buffalo. The town is the ...

)

PBA50 Tour titles

# 2021 Johnny Petraglia BVL Open (

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)

Awards and recognition

* 1992 PBA Rookie of the Year * Won at least one PBA title in six straight seasons (1998 through 2003-04) * One of only three three-time winners in the Tournament of Champions (with

Mike Durbin } Michael William Durbin (born May 3, 1941 in Hollywood, California) is a retired American professional bowler and bowling broadcaster, and is a member of both the Professional Bowlers Association (PBA) and United States Bowling Congress (USBC) Ha ...

and

Jason Belmonte Jason Belmonte (born 29 July 1983) is an Australian professional ten-pin bowler. He plays on the PBA Tour in the United States and in world events. He is known for being one of the first bowlers to gain media attention for using the two hand ...

), and the only one to win three ''consecutive'' TOC events * Elected to the PBA Hall of Fame in 2012. * Elected to the

United States Bowling Congress The United States Bowling Congress (USBC) is a sports membership organization dedicated to ten-pin bowling in the United States. It was formed in 2005 by a merger of the American Bowling Congress—the original codifier of all tenpin bowling stand ...

Hall of Fame in 2013.

Sources

* PBA.com, official site of the Professional Bowlers Association * http://www.jasoncouch.com, official Jason Couch fan site

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Couch, Jason American ten-pin bowling players 1969 births Living people