About Us

The mission of Southwest Bowling Tour LLC (SBT) is to deliver high-quality tournaments to the bowling communities of the southwestern USA — offering fair competition for bowlers across a wide range of skill levels. With efficient operations and guaranteed prize funds, our tournaments are designed for bowlers of all abilities to compete against others with similar abilities, but for larger prizes than most local or regional events. All our events have great prize payouts that are guaranteed from top-to-bottom regardless of the number of entries we receive. We believe that by guaranteeing the value of every prize in our events, bowlers can compete with confidence, knowing that there won't be any surprises with low payouts if the turnout isn't high. 

Headquartered in Arizona, but reaching into adjacent states as well, we run most of our tournaments on Challenge oil patterns — which are moderate in difficulty — but we will occasionally hold events on harder Sport patterns. In rare cases, we may hold events on easier Recreational patterns. We hold a few large tournaments per year across multiple days with top prizes of $5,000 or more, plus more frequent single-day events (called Saturday Shootouts) with first place typically paying $2,500. We do this while keeping our entry fees relatively low (around $100) considering the size of our prize funds. 

Our owner and tournament director, John Verbil, grew up in a bowling family and served as the secretary of many leagues starting in his youth and continuing for roughly 35 years. While still in high school in the late 1970s, he wrote software to manage bowling leagues and continued evolving it most of that time through many technology changes. He has been running bowling tournaments in Arizona and surrounding areas since 2023 and has established a reputation for running efficient and fair events that offer bowlers a great value.

Before retiring from the corporate world in 2024, John was a software architect/engineer by trade for nearly 40 years, leading many development teams for a Fortune 100 company, and is the lead- or co-inventor on 21 U.S. Patents.  As SBT begins, he is leveraging this expertise into building a brand-new and state-of-the-art software system to manage tournament operations.

As a bowler, John has a modest but respectable resume, bowling his first 300 in 1993, with four more in competition since then, including one on a Sport pattern. His biggest achievements include winning the first televised ABT in Arizona, at Papago Lanes in Scottsdale in 1983, climbing the ladder to claim the $1,000 first prize. Much more recently, in 2021, he was the Division B All-Events Champion for the Arizona State USBC Open Championships. In 2023, he won the $5,000 Senior tournament in the summer TAT in Las Vegas, just a few months after earning $4,000 for a 2nd place finish in the winter TAT Senior event.

John has been very blessed by the widespread encouragement from many people throughout the Arizona bowling community and beyond — fellow bowlers along with center managers, pro shop operators, and sponsors — to run independent events. John and his loyal and dedicated team will do so with the same focus we've always brought — creating fun, challenging, and lucrative tournaments for bowlers across a wide range of skill levels. We will have timely and efficiently-run squads, same-day payouts (in cash as much as possible, or check), clear and transparent rules, especially on averages and handicaps, and a determination to be the very best tournament organization in the southwestern USA. Join us for our next event.

Welcome to the Southwest Bowling Tour!