I started going bowling regularly about a year ago. I had always been a straight bowler, and never being particularly strong I still used an eight pound ball that I got for Christmas when I was about 10. My buddies all hooked, though, and while I would have the occasional winning game my high was 175 and I rarely topped 150 averaging probably between 110 and 120. So I learned to hook. As my eight pound ball could never supply enough power I moved up to ten and shortly afterwards to twelve. My average increased a little bit, but I was still pretty inconsistent.
The first big step I took was learning to use the arrows on the lane. I had always looked at the pins when bowling and tried to look where I wanted the ball to go. This works pretty well for a straight ball, because pretty much all that matters is where the ball ends up. If you also know where you are starting from it is easy to notice how you are missing. With a hook, though, it is much harder to fix mistakes that way. My bowling buddy one day wondered about focusing on the arrows and we both tried it and found a good amount of improvement there. We found it much easier to stay consistently accurate by focusing on where the ball is going when it passes the arrows. Watching the arrows and feeling how much speed and hook you put on the ball, you can tell almost right away where the ball is going to strike the pins. Also, it's easy to make adjustments when you find you are consistently missing the right arrow. This probably bumped my average another five to ten pins and I eventually got a 190 high.
This past Christmas I got a twelve pound bowling ball and from all I'd heard having your own ball is supposed to dramatically improve your score. I couldn't get a feel for it, though. My average did get up to about 130, but that hardly seemed worth having my own ball. I just couldn't find the right approach. My ball tended to hook too early and lose its angular momentum by the time it struck pins. A few weeks ago my buddy and I were watching Women's College Bowling on ESPN2 and heard the announcers discuss the grease pattern of the lanes. The next time we bowled we found that the particular lanes we roll at are greased in the center much further down the lane than on the edges. Since I'd always tended to bowl to the outside the ball would hit dry boards too early and thus hook too early. I changed my approach to start more to the left of center (being right-handed) and to bowl more down the middle of the lane with great improvement. Two weeks ago I averaged 161 with a high of 201 and last week my average was 156 with a high of 207!
It's pretty awesome that we've figured these things out in order to get better. It wasn't just a matter of "Oh, I've bowled for a long time so now I'm good" or "Oh, I got this new ball so now I'm awesome"; it was a matter of learning more about the game and why the ball goes where it goes. I'm sure we could have looked online to find these sorts of tips, but it is really cool to see the progress from learning more about the game. Hopefully I can continue my new found success tonight!
