A Scattered Brain

As you may or may not have noticed, I’ve been pretty quiet about bowling lately and that has been for one primary reason… the last two months have really been bad. Ever since my great night (and best ever) on January 16th, I’ve not had one night over my average. Until last night… and it all just seemed to click again.

I bowled a 603 series and had two games over 200. My release was smooth and consistent and for the most part, my targeting was good too. Even in the middle 162 game, most of my strike shots were decent with a couple of bad breaks with splits.

Here are my scores for the season; you’ll be able to see what I mean about my slump.

I’ve also gotten my average back up over 180… dropping below that was a real shot against my ego for this season. There are only 8 weeks left that count toward average so achieving my goal of 190 for the season is well out of reach. If I can get two more series in the 600’s and none in the 400’s over that time I’ll be pretty happy.

So, we’ve just nearly passed the mid point of the season and so far, not too bad. I’ve had a few bad weeks, but for the most part it was pretty nice. I’ve been able to maintain a 180+ average, about 10 pins higher than last season so that’s a positive.

My biggest issue and average killer is my recent decline in spare shooting. Outside of this past week, I’ve been missing about half of my single pin spares. Sometimes I would shrug it off, but then I realized that shooting a single pin spare (no matter the pin) is like shooting free throws in basketball. I have a high standard when I see pro and college players shooting less than 90% free throws and now will hold myself to the same standard. If I can’t make 90% of my single pin spares, obviously I should work on that first and foremost. I can’t expect to strike more than 50% of the time so spare shooting is extremely important. Missing a single pin can account for 11 pins in scoring (the spare + next frame) so it is worth much more than just the single miss. This will be the thing I work on most over the rest of the season.

So, here are my scores for the first 17 weeks. Enjoy.

Did you see that last week!!!! I had some lucky breaks in the first two games and some equally unlucky breaks in the third game. Regardless, 641 is my personal best 3 game series so I’m pleased with that. I’ll be even happier if I get another 600 series next week…

Please note, I’m not sure why the table gets a little messed up when it posts, while editing everything looks good. It doesn’t seem to matter how I input the table, so oh well. I’m thinking about moving my blog elsewhere, and this may be the catalyst to do so.

Take care all and have a great week.

This bowling year is off to a strange start.  The first week was horrible and the last two weeks have started bad and ended GREAT!  Here is the chart:

Here’s the best and worst part.  I know exactly what I’m changing during that third game; my tempo.  For some reason though, it’s taking that long to adjust to find what’s right for me.  If I can get that reaction time down to a reasonable level I think I can start to average 190+ on a regular basis.

So, the summer season is over.  I ended up with a 185 average which isn’t too bad, but the season was a steady decline from the first week on down.  I’ll try to make the trend the other way for the long winter season.  I plan to incorporate something into my game that I’m always lacking; focus.  I will be more deliberate with my approach and try to throw every ball with a purpose instead of sometimes showing focus and other times just going up and bowling quickly.  Even if I am having a bad game/night, I need to work on maintaining a solid focus so that is my first goal for this season.

As far as average, I’m going to shoot for a goal of 190 for the season.  This will be quite difficult I know over 30+ weeks.  Goals are meant to be hard though, right?

I will try to be more consistent with updating my scores for those that have missed it.  We’ll see how that goes.

Greetings All once again,

So, the new season has started and along with bowling, I am also the League Secretary/Treasurer.  It’s the first time for me to take on that role, and aside from the extra cash I’ll receive at the end of the season, it’s something that really keeps me busy throughout the night.  I thought it would be just a simple as collecting the money and validating scores, but there is actually quite a bit more; so I guess it seems I’ll be really earning the money.

From a bowling stand point, at least so far, the added responsibilities have helped my game.  I’m focusing so much time and energy on my duties that when it’s time for me to go up to bowl I just quickly clear my head and go for it.  I do a lot less thinking in between frames not allowing me to over-analyze my previous frame(s).

Here is the table for the league so far:

If I’m lucky, I hope to be able to maintain above a 190 average for the summer.  I believe that 200 at this time, while it would be wonderful is a bit unrealistic.  190 may be as well, but with the good start, I wouldn’t feel right to keep my original goal of 180.

I hope all is well with all of you!

Greetings to all of my bowling fans. The long winter season is finally over. We have two weeks off before the summer session starts; so now is the best time to post my last set of stats. So, without further ado, here are the details of the entire season:

Overall, I am much more pleased with the second half than I was with the first half.  My spare shooting improved tremendously.  I had a lot more clean games (especially in the last 5 weeks with 4 of them).

One striking statistic is the average per game number.  In the first half, they were all fairly even; now there is a clear improvement from the first game to the third.  Perhaps, I should come and bowl an extra game of warmup on league nights?  Something to consider for the summer.

Well, I’ll let you go for now.  With the new software I’m writing to track my scores, it may be a while before I write the ability to export to a web format, but it will be something I’m working on.

Have a great day and take care!

Greetings all,

I hope you all had a terrific holiday season.  Bowling is back in full swing (it’s been going the last couple of weeks as well, but nothing really exciting to write about) and we got a 4th member for our team and I think that will work out very well.

So, why was it the best night ever?  Well, I had a couple of personal bests.  First, all of my games were over my average so that’s always a good thing.  Second, I had my highest series ever: 633 (for a 211 average for the night).  Now, that by itself is enough to make me happy and fairly proud, but there is more.

My last game was absolutely incredible.  I opened up with the first 9 frames as strikes and had a perfect game going into the 10th.  Well, rather it was nervers, freak release, combination of it all, I didn’t finish the 300 game.  I ended up with a 4 spare 8 in the tenth to finish with a 272.  Even in practice, where I normally average about 10 pins higher than league, I’ve never broken 270 before.  The game got really exciting after I got the first six strikes in a row, also a first for me.  I feel good that even after the nerves started kicking in that I continued to strike for a few more frames.

These are the types of nights that make bowling really fun and keep you coming back.  Now to find a way to do that kind of thing more consistently.

Have a great day!

Greetings to one and all (mostly I’m pretty sure it’s just my wife and the J that read this, and for that I truly thank you)

It isn’t exactly quite mid-season, but given that the rest of my team will miss the next two weeks I’m thinking we will just forfeit.  Of course, I’ll still probably go and bowl, but most likely not as part of my team at those times.  Given that, I’ll go ahead and reflect on my performance to this date.

Here are all of my scores up until now:

We’ll start with the bad news and move on to the good news.  First thing that sticks out is the fact that my best week (and only 200 game of the season) was the first week.  I have no real explanation for this.  The other truly bad statistic is in 45 games so far, I’ve not had one clean game at all.  I don’t get that many in practice (I’ve only had 2 in about 90 games over the same time period) but that indicates a lot of missed easy spares.  My average would easily jump 10-20 pins a game if I could just stop missing so many single pin spares, which are really inexcusable to miss with such a relatively large margin of error.

Now to take some positive things from these stats.  First, I’m within a 4 pin range for each of my games each week.  That means that I don’t consistently have a bad game based only on where it comes out of the three.  So week to week, I may have a bad game 1, but overall it seems to even out.  Also, my average has stayed consistent since it came down from that really inflated first few weeks.  It may mean I haven’t improved much, but it also means I haven’t declined either.

I have been working on many tweaks in my game from my stance, to approach, to release and I’m hoping that from the lesson I’ve taken so far to some more planned lessons in the future that these changes will pay off in the long term.

Most importantly, I still enjoy going every week and as long as I’m having fun, I will continue.  Of course, you always have more fun if you can see yourself improving, but I’m sure that will come in time.

I hope that all of you have a truly Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.  Be safe over the holidays and hopefully you’re able to take some time off to enjoy the season!

Good morning all,

Last night was a strange night, and I’m just lucky it kept me around my average.  Apparently, they waxed the floors Tuesday night and everything was very slippery.  During practice a lot of people were sliding more than usual.  To counteract this, I put on a more sticky surface on my slide foot and boy was that a painful mistake.  My first (and only) attempt during practice with that I got stuck on my last step and fell face forward onto the lane.  Luckily I was able to break my fall without hurting myself at all.

Unfortunately, it made me timid the whole night and I was rolling the ball with little purpose or focus.  The ball wasn’t hitting the pins as hard and it left me with some tough spares.  I would also throw my spare ball lightly and that caused me to miss more than I would have expected.  Overall, I was right around my average with a 170, 159, 168 output, which is good considering the off night.

As a team, we didn’t bowl below our average but still lost 5 out of 7 points to the other team.

I was saddened when the J didn’t show up as the replacement for my fallen teammate so I guess I’ll just have to ask the league to find someone. 

On a much better and more serious note; today is our 4th anniversary!  I can’t believe we’ve been married for 4 years and more so how much more I love Kylah now than ever before.  My life with her is better than I could have ever imagined my life before I met her.  I love you, honey!  Here’s to many many more to come.

Take care all!

Greetings to all,

Last night was a decent night (178, 188, 146 - 512 series - 170 daily avg) so that was pretty nice.  The main reason for the good scores (and the one bad one) is that I had my thumb holes tightened up a bit.  This allowed me to not squeeze my grip as much which gives a much more consistent delivery.  However, my thumb swelled up a bit the third game and I couldn’t use my spare ball anymore and had a hard time converting spares.  I will leave things as they are for next week, but if it’s still too tight I’ll open up the hole just a little bit.

The big story of the night, and this is truly amazing, is that there were two 300 games bowled by two different people durning the second game.  One guy was on a lane on the opposite side of the bowling center, but everything stopped once he had 11 strikes.  Then about 10 minutes later, a guy on the pair of lanes next to me bowled a 300 and again everything was focused on him.  I’ve not seen a 300 bowled at all in league before personally, and to see two of them is pretty impressive.  Oh, to have one 300 game in my lifetime would be great.

As far as my team goes; the individual who was most likely quitting did in fact quit so now I have to find a replacement.  I thought I had one but that fell through as well.  I know there are other teams that had people left so there may be a way to combine some of those so we’ll see.

As always, have a great rest of the week!