The Youth Bowling Round Table: Getting Started, Having Fun, and Setting Expectations

Welcome to Bowling This Month’s first Youth Bowling Round Table article. In this recurring feature, we’ll take aim at questions related to youth bowling. We’ll talk about youth bowlers, skill development, getting ready for tournaments, and other topics of interest to young players, their parents, and coaches. We’ll be featuring trusted Bowling This Month contributors from various backgrounds to lend their expertise and opinions on questions each month. If there’s a question you’d like to ask our panelists, please feel free to comment below and we will try to address it in upcoming segments.

This month’s focus is all about setting the foundation, with questions related to early expectations and where to start as a young bowler. Special thanks to our panelists, Juha Maja, Andy Penny, Joe Hoenig, Heather D’Errico, Josh Blanchard, and Tyrel Rose. Let’s dive in.

When working with a brand new youth bowler, particularly younger ones, how do you approach striking a balance between having fun so they want to come back every week and starting the skill development process so they can establish fundamentals?

Juha Maja

I have a simple principle about this: I start to teach them when they start to ask questions. Still, I favor fun over skill development in the early stages, so I limit the amount of coaching to a minimum until they appear ready for learning and development.

Andy Penny

You have to take each individual case separately, even at the very early stage, to find out what the bowler wants to achieve. […] The skill in the coaching technique is to combine having fun (first and foremost, especially as they get older—it’s easy with the younger ones to be having fun) while ...