May
is the start of the lawn bowling season in Canada. All clubs try at this time
of year to interest new people to become members and take up the sport. I
started participating after attending an Open House at James Gardens LBC in May
2012. I help out with the mentoring and coaching at this same club as my
volunteering contribution to the maintenance of the sport.
The core of the instruction is trying to give new bowlers sufficient skill
delivering a draw shot that they can become involved in social bowling as a
lead. What I have noticed is that our teaching methods have not changed to keep
pace with the modern technologies that are widely available to our students. Because
lawn bowling instruction videos are now available via the internet, teachers at
the club level should be taking advantage of them. Different styles of
delivery are taught and a new bowler can be directed to a bowling style consistent with his or her physical condition, taking into account slight
disabilities such as arthritic hands, bad knees or bad backs. There are many
different deliveries: the athletic delivery, the crouch delivery, the semi-crouch,
the Scotttish runner and the South African. Instead of trying to teach everyone
the athletic delivery, we should be showing people such videos illustrating the
different styles and work with them to select the most appropriate. The
different styles are well illustrated for example by the great bowler Tony Alcock at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilifGJBDo5U.
After showing them what is available, we club mentors can let the newcomers try
to imitate a selected delivery on our green. I think we will get many more people
interested in lawn bowls if they can choose a delivery that is not a strain on
their natural capabilities.
For some reason we coaches have got into the habit of teaching how to use the bowl's bias by saying, "Place the small symbol on the inside." This always seems to confuse new bowlers. Finally while instructing a new bowler while in Portugal, I realized the message gets accross much better if you say that the large symbol ashould be on the outside. When you think about a lawn bowls rink it is much more obvious where the outside is than the 'inside'.
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