I won't pretend to know all the ins and outs of the SMART Fund, which seems to have reached a point of stability after some turbulent years.
Scholarship tournaments and SMART didn't exist when I was a youth bowler, and I've never found the time and energy to analyze it to the point where I'd feel comfortable making definitive statements about it.
But I know that when a group puts a big chunk of money in SMART it means they have confidence in it, which is what happened with the announcement...