WATERLOO — Marshalltown boys bowling wasn’t at their best on Tuesday afternoon, but they were a little better than last year.

The Bobcats showed some late fire to win the seventh-place trophy in the IHSAA Class 3A Team Tournament at Cadillac XBC in Waterloo.

MHS swept Cedar Falls, 3-0, in the seventh-place best-of-5 match, to improve on the team’s eighth-place finish from a year ago.

Six of the bowlers from last year’s team were back at state this year, but the all-important 15 pre-bracket Bakers didn’t break the Bobcats’ way, finishing sixth with a 2,978 pin total and missing the cutoff for the top-4 championship bracket by nearly 350 pins.

Marshalltown missed 11 single-pin spares in the pre-bracket Bakers.

“That was definitely giving me a nervous breakdown,” MHS head coach Nate Clark said, perhaps jokingly.

Several more open frames cut the Bobcats’ momentum off at the knees — the Bobcats’ best game was a 245 in the penultimate Baker, but the ‘Cats also had four games around 20 or more pins less than MHS’ 195.4 Baker game average coming into the tournament.

Now only able to bowl for fifth place at best, the Bobcats’ consolation semifinal didn’t go much better, swept by Des Moines Lincoln by scores of 221-168, 246-214 and 191-184.

That dropped MHS down to the seventh-place match, and the pep talk from Clark was simple.

“Win three straight so we can go home,” Clark deadpanned.

The Bobcats came alive, walloping Cedar Falls 230-178 in the first game.

The second game was a little closer, as Cedar Falls rolled out at 223 to give Marshalltown a target to hit. All Aiden Cowan had to do was roll three consecutive strikes in the 10th frame.

The first one he rolled took all that pressure off immediately.

“After I threw that first ball, I was cheesing the whole time. I knew I had it,” Cowan said.

Sure enough, last year’s 3A individual champion delivered a single-pin victory, 224-223, to give the Bobcats the commanding 2-0 lead in the match, and MHS took it home with a 200-183 win in game three to clinch seventh place.

“Every little bit of progression toward the end goal of winning in bowling is always just so rewarding,” Cowan said.

The Bobcats bid farwell to Zackary Morris, who was the team’s reserve bowler for Tuesday’s tournament.

“He’s a senior, part of the group last year, so I wanted to make sure he was with us,” Clark said. “He’s a pretty good hype man for the guys too, so that helps.”

All six bowlers who competed on Tuesday can return next year to take another crack at it and get the finish they’ve been wanting all along.

“The goal is to win it all, that’s what we wanted this year, and nothing changes,” Clark said. “We’re very capable of doing it, we’ve just got to figure out things in key moments.”

Cowan added, “We know we have to get our get back next year and get a placement unlike what we’ve had these past two years.”