The United States Bowling Congress (USBC) has launched USBC Youth Rankings, powered by Junior Gold, a national and state ranking system for competitive youth bowlers.
The platform is the first national and state-based ranking system of its kind for competitive youth bowlers in the United States.
Only Junior Gold members are ranked, and the rankings are included with that membership at no extra cost. The launch is a testing and evaluation phase - rankings may shift as more data is added and the system is refined.
What the Rankings Show
Bowlers are ranked by age and gender, using the same eight divisions as the Junior Gold Championships: U12, U14, U16 and U18, for boys and girls.
A bowler's division stays the same for the whole season. Each athlete can appear in both a state ranking and a national ranking. State rankings compare bowlers within the state tied to their membership, so a bowler can rank higher in their state than nationally.
The USBC Youth Rankings website lets visitors browse by season, division and state, or search for a player by name. It also has pages for trending players and college bowling. Each profile shows the bowler's name, city, state and division.
Which Results Count
The ranking uses three types of data: certified league averages, results from local, state and regional tournaments recorded through SMART (the system USBC uses for scholarship tournament results, including Junior Gold qualifiers), and placement at the Junior Gold Championships.
The results are cumulative. USBC says rankings do not reset each season, and the data builds on a bowler's previous results.
Why Only Junior Gold Members
USBC says it first looked at ranking all USBC Youth members but found uneven data, possible regional bias and inconsistent results. It also said only about 10,000 youth members, roughly 10% of the total, had scholarship data recorded in recent years.
The organization then focused on the 6,000 to 7,000 Junior Gold members it counts each year, saying this group had more complete competition data. Bowlers who are not Junior Gold members are not ranked.
The site currently shows 2025-26 season rankings, not the 2026-27 season. USBC says the new season was about three months old at launch, with only part of the Junior Gold memberships processed and most scholarship results not yet recorded.
The next Junior Gold Championships are in July 2027, so that part of the data is also missing. USBC says it will review the available data monthly to decide when the first 2026-27 rankings can be published. The most recent Junior Gold Championships took place in July in Minneapolis, where eight national champions were crowned.
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How to Check a Ranking
Go to the USBC Youth Rankings site, choose the season, division and state, or search for the bowler by name. Membership details are on the USBC Junior Gold page, and the full announcement is in the USBC news release.
