Digging Deep Into Ball Motion

Ball motion is a complicated topic. There are many variables that go into what makes good ball motion, so it can’t help but be complex. While great coaches can take complicated topics and explain them in simple ways, it is dangerous to make things too simple.

In many ways, the current understanding of ball motion is an oversimplification. There is simply too much happening as the ball travels down the lane to boil it all down to “skid, hook, and roll.”

With this in mind, I’m going to introduce 10 different phases or elements of ball motion that form key parts of how the ball travels down the lane to help you better understand what’s really going on. In order from the foul line to the pins, these are:

• Loft: the projection out onto the lane.
• Skid: the initial phase of the ball motion after it touches the lane.
• Read: the point of the ball’s first speed loss and angle change.
• Hook start: when the ball starts changing direction.
• Increasing hook: the phase where the amount of direction change is increasing.
• Breakpoint: the apex of the curve.
• Maximum hook: the point where the ball is changing direction the most.
• Decreasing hook: the ball starts straightening out.
• Roll: the ball has stopped hooking and is rolling straight.
• Pindeck reaction: how the ball travels through the pins.

By looking at each of these elements, we can also reestablish our understanding of the heads, midlane, and back end. With so many variables in bowling, it’s far too simplistic to divide the lane into equal thirds. Using the 10 elements listed above, we can instead divide the lane this way:

• Heads: the portion of the lane where the ball passes through the loft, skid, and read phases.
• Midlane: the section of the lane from the hook start to the breakpoint.
• Back end: the final section of the lane where the ball passes from the breakpoint through the pin deck.

By these measures, each section of the lane will vary in length based on the environment and bowler, which makes sense. How can the midlane be identical on a 33-foot pattern and a 52-foot pattern? Bowlers intuitively understand this, but by looking at each ...