Tricks of the Bowling Coaching Trade – Part 4

Don’t let the title of this article fool you. Like the other articles in this series, it is aimed at coaches, but a bowler can also definitely benefit from the drills below if you wish to attempt them yourself. This article highlights a drill that many one-handed bowlers might never even think of because it involves using two hands. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

One of the more challenging tasks a bowling coach has is teaching bowlers to roll the ball properly. The concept seems simple: the ball is a sphere, so just roll the ball down the lane, right? If you hand a basketball to a bowler and ask them to roll it down the lane, they can do it without even thinking about it, as it’s very natural to roll a sphere. The problems start when we drill holes in the ball—especially when we drill three holes in the ball.

The fingers go in two of the holes and that’s fine. Most people would agree that if they could put two finger holes in the basketball, they could roll it even better. But that third hole—the one the thumb goes in—now that’s a problem. We now have created what the industry calls a “grip” in the ball. Now that we have a grip, it’s much easier to pick the ball up with one hand and carry it around. That’s great for a suitcase, of course, but we don’t try to roll suitcases down the lane.

As a bowling coach, you need to stop thinking of those three holes as a grip and start thinking of them as a handle, because that’s what they become in the mind of many bowlers who struggle to roll the ball. Imagine that you took the handle off a suitcase and attached it to a bowling ball. You could carry it around ...