Creating Comfort on Difficult Lane Conditions

This article is geared toward the high school and collegiate bowlers who are still relatively new to competing on PBA, WTBA, Kegel, NCAA, or any other type of “sport” oil patterns. It is designed to assist with some insights toward increasing your chances for success. It should also help those that frequently compete on these type of patterns with limited or no success.

As with all of my articles, this one deals predominantly with changes needed to be made internally by you, the bowler. Always be willing to take a hard honest look at yourself when trying to create change and improvement. External factors will always be secondary.

Prerequisites and additional factors

Obviously, as has been discussed before, the most important prerequisite to succeeding on difficult conditions is consistent execution. If you have serious physical flaws in your execution, you need to go back to the drawing board and work on these areas before you are ready to compete in the sport bowling arena. There is less margin for error on these types of patterns, so shotmaking is at a higher premium.

There is also equipment selection, which will be discussed, but is not the main focus of this article. There is also the factor of adjusting to the lanes as they transition throughout the course of the tournament. Also, there is spare shooting. All of these are important pieces of the puzzle, but they are not the main focus here. Today, we want to look at a base philosophy for creating comfort right out of the gate, to get you off on the right foot, and to subsequently allow the other factors to have relevance to the success equation.

Executing with comfort

We arrive here with the premise that your physical game itself is relatively solid and is not preventing you from executing consistent, quality shots. So this begs the question, why am I struggling on sport conditions? You may possess a strong physical game, but beyond ...