Who needs practice anyway? Besides, you probably go play a couple of games on your own or with friends now and again, that’s practice enough, right? You play in league games during the week; you’re getting practice that way. Really, who needs practice? Well, the answer to that question is; anyone looking to improve their game and play at their best. You know the old joke, where a tourist in New York, looking for directions asks, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” and he is so accurately told, “Practice, practice, practice”. In season, or out of season, practice is essential to improve and stay on top of your game.
Sure, you may be playing those two or three games a week in leagues and that should keep you sharp enough without practice. But the difference between competition play and practice is in competition you play your game, in practice you work on your game. Your goal in completion is attaining the highest score possible but the score during practice is irrelevant. In fact, you should not even be bowling a “game” during practice but rather working on shots and the physical areas of your game you want to improve. Granted, practice is not always fun and can border on boring. But practice must be a part of the process if you are to make advances in your performance during leagues and tournaments. To take the edge off practice, after your time in practice bowl a games to see how you do in those areas you worked on in practice.
Series of habits
The act of throwing a balling ball is a series of habits because there is too little time to think about the actions. From set up to release, it may take two or three seconds, with specifics of the delivery, such as push away, slide and release, taking just fractions of a second. There is just no time to put thought into each or any of these actions.
Because of this, making a change in bowling does not happen right away, not proficiently anyway. To change and get used to new habits is why you need to practice. Another reason is to experiment with new changes to improve your game. You can’t (or shouldn’t) try new things during competition. The time to get used to a five instead of four step approach, or whatever it is you want to change, is during practice. And remember, changes take time. Expect to have some bad throws and feeling uncomfortable when you make a change until your whole throwing process gets used to the new change. Your body will adjust to the new wrinkle, but just give it time and lots of practice.
How to Practice
How do you practice? What do you practice? During competition, make note of areas where you did not perform to your satisfaction (missed ten pins, inconsistency in hitting your mark, your timing felt off, anything you were not happy with), and work on them next time you are at practice.
As for improving specific shots, don’t worry about what pins are up there. If you are practicing on 7 pins and a full rack of pins is up, try to pick off the 7 pin. If you succeed in hitting the pin on the first throw, on the second ball, try to hit the gap where the 7 pin stood.
Games for practice
Be creative. A game you can play for practicing alone or with others is what I call, “Target Practice”. The rules and a sample score card are below.
Another practice game you could try is call Swedish Scoring. This game comes from Jeri Edwards, Team USA Asst. Coach. The game helps you focus on hitting the pocket and making spares. The game is played over 10 frames and a perfect score is 20. Scoring is a follows:
- Pocket first ball strike 2 points
- Pocket and spare 1 point
- Out of pocket first ball and spare 0 points
- Pocket first ball and no spare -1 points
- Out of pocket first ball and no spare -2 points
- Missed single pin -3 points
Try these games next time you are at practice. They are fun and a great way to work on accuracy and consistency of your throws.
TARGET PRACTICE
In this game you practice accuracy by knocking down a target number of pins in each frame. The following are definitions of each row in the scorecard below:
- Frame: the game includes 10 frames as in a regular game of bowling.
- Throws: The number of throws allowed in each frame.
- Target: The number of pins you must knock down with the number of allowed throws for the frame in order to obtain the points allocated for that frame.
- Points: Number of points allocated to each frame for knocking down the number of target pins for that frame.
- Enter the total number of pins for each throw allowed in the “Result” boxes.
- Add total number of pins knocked down in the one or two throws allowed for the frame.
- If you knock down the exact number of target pins within the one or two throws allowed in any one frame, enter the points score for that frame in the “Score” boxes.
- After all frames are completed. Sum the total of points scored in each frame to obtain your game total score. A perfect is, of course, 300.
| Frame | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Total |
| Throws | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | |
| Target | X | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | |
| Points | 10 | 10 | 20 | 20 | 30 | 30 | 40 | 40 | 50 | 50 | 300 |
| Result | |||||||||||
| Score |