Amateur Carolyn attended
West Texas State University on a partial bowling scholarship. While there, she led the University to back to back national titles and was a three-time All-American. She was the MVP of the Intercollegiate Bowling Championships in 1989. She graduated in 1989 with a B.A. in Communications. She has been a member of Team USA for multiple seasons. In 2011, she was part of the team that went to the WTBA World Women's Championships in
Hong Kong and took home gold for the United States in the team event for the first time since 1987.
Professional During the original existence of the PWBA Tour, Carolyn was one of its top bowlers. Carolyn had 20 Tour titles over a 14-year career (1990–2003). She won her first title in a doubles tournament in 1991 with her partner,
Lisa Wagner, who was one of the top bowlers on the tour in the 1980s. Dorin-Ballard's first singles title was earned at the 1994 Lady
Ebonite Classic. With the support of her sister and husband, her career really took off in 1997, when she began a string of eight titles in four seasons, beginning with the 1997 Three Rivers Classic. In that period she was the runner up in the Player of the Year voting all four seasons. Among Dorin-Ballard's 20 PWBA titles (tied for seventh all-time) are three major championships (1997 and 2001 Brunswick World Open, 2001
WIBC Queens) and a Player of the Year award in 2001. The 2001 season was her career year. She won seven titles (including two of her three majors), posted an average of 214.73, and earned $135,045 in prize money. She received many honors this year including nomination for an
ESPY award. She tied or broke 11 PWBA Tour records in 2001, including setting a record for most titles (7) and the most TV finals appearances (18) in a season. She won two PBA Women's Series titles (2007 Great Lakes Classic and 2008 Cheetah Championship). She also won the PBA Women's Series Showdown, a non-title event held in April, 2009. In 2006, she joined top female bowlers from around the world in the USBC Women's Challenge tournament. The event took place on a single lane, in the middle of a shopping mall in
Las Vegas, Nevada. This event was particularly challenging, because all of the distractions of a mall (music, voices, people walking in the upper level) were present during the entire tournament. She made it to the semi-finals where she was defeated by
Clara Guerrero. (Guerrero would go on to lose to
Cara Honeychurch in the final.) Following the disbandment of the PWBA in 2003, Dorin-Ballard started to bowl against men in PBA competition. In 2007, she became the first woman to bowl a perfect game in a PBA event, doing so in match play at the
USBC Masters. As a member of the PBA Southwest Region, she once rolled back-to-back 300 games in a
PBA Regional Tour event. The only major missing from Dorin-Ballard's resume is the
U.S. Women's Open, although she has made the semi-finals five times (2003, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010) with runner-up finishes in the 2003 and 2009 events. Carolyn is known as one of the best female bowlers of all time, and at the Kegel training center also has the title of being the most accurate player in history of the testing center, hitting the exact target over 30 times in a row at exactly the same speed. During the PBA Women's Series Showdown in 2009, CDB rolled 20 consecutive strikes over two games to earn the distinction of rolling the most consecutive strikes in the history of televised bowling (male or female). (The previous mark of 18 consecutive strikes had been set by the PBA's
Ryan Shafer two years earlier.) Currently a Roto Grip staffer, Carolyn is representing the brand with her recent bowling with Team USA and was on the roster for the PanAmerican games. In 2014, Dorin-Ballard won the BPAA's
Dick Weber Bowling Ambassador Award, an honor given annually to the "bowling athlete who has consistently shown grace on and off the lanes by promoting the sport of bowling in a positive manner." In 2020, Dorin-Ballard was inducted into the PWBA Hall of Fame for Superior Performance. ==List of professional titles==