Do You Really want Lawn Bowling to be Attractive to Younger People? The Acid Test is Respotting the Jack

Many old-school lawn bowlers affirm repeatedly that they want to encourage young people to take up lawn bowling. But, very often they are not prepared to introduce those modifications to the rules of the game that would encourage younger people to be more enthusiastic. A case in point is the rule about dead ends.

Presently in Ontario, the local rule is that each team is allowed to cause one dead end in a match and that end will be replayed, but after that one dead end, any further dead end caused by the same team gives one point to the opposition. This discourages drive shots.  The tactical merit of drive shots aside, drives are exciting, dramatic, and are practiced more by younger bowlers than by older. Thus, favoring a rule that discourages drives, encourages the view that lawn bowls is an old persons’ game-sort of shuffle board with wheels!

It is not as if there is no good alternative that would limit matches to the specified number of games while not penalizing heavy shots. Respotting the jack to a preset spot if it is driven out of bounds is already used by professional bowlers and serves well to limit game durations. The change was actually introduced to make bowls more suitable for television. It just happens to be something that would make bowls more youth friendly. The trouble is that the senior members who run local tournaments, very often, on their own initiative, just opt for the rule that penalizes the team that sends the jack out of bounds.