Jack Strategies for Poor Greens

Throughout the summer in Canada, most of the lawn bowling rinks that I play on are less well maintained than those in Australia or Portugal. This is not surprising. These latter places don’t have a freezing winter to contend with. Whatever.  

An uneven surface favors less skilled players simply because anything that increases the element of luck helps them (or me as the case may be); however, there are aspects of poor rinks that can give extra advantages to a more experienced team that knows what to look for.

On some rinks the two meters closest to the ditches slopes off towards these edges by so much that a bowl that arrives near them almost inevitably continues on into the ditch. An observant team should not ask a lead to deliver jacks to within 4 meters of such front ditches. The reason: better players are more likely than poorer ones to deliver bowls behind the jack and if the jack is close to the front ditch such bowls will be lost.

In utter contrast to the above, there are other rinks that have somewhat of a physical barrier at one and sometimes both ends. Sometimes this is a thin strip of longer grass. Sometimes it is a raised strip of carpet on an older synthetic  green. Sometimes it is an actual strip of wood or metal intended to support the grass but which over time has become higher than the playing surface as a whole. This lip on a rink is usually higher at some places than others.

This lip at the edge of the ditch can be used to improve your control of your team’s preferred jack length. Move the mat up the green so that the distance from the front edge of the mat to the two meter line at the front ditch is precisely what you would like. Then, bowl the jack, aiming it so that if it is long it will encounter this lip at the front ditch. So long as your deliver is at or past the two meter mark and so long as your delivery is not so strong that it jumps over the lip into the gutter, you will end up with the exact length you want once the jack is re-spotted on the T as the rules require.  The protruding lip at the area of the ditch where you have aimed gives your team a reduced likelihood of losing the jack and a correspondingly increased chance to get your most preferred length! 

Comparison of Aero 3.5 Sonic with Taylor 3 Vector VS on Outdoor Synthetic at James Gardens

I just received my new Aero bowls with the indented Z grip. I took them to James Gardens and compared them with my old Vector VS bowls. I can deliver each along the same initial path. My aim point in each case is the number sign on the adjacent rink. At the hog line they have taken the exact same path. If there is a difference in the trajectory at which they enter the head, it is very difficult to detect because the weight of the two deliveries being compared would need to be exact.

What I can say is that my grip is more secure on the Vector VS  because my fingertips can sink into the small circular indents, while with the Z grip it is only skin that enters the zig-zag lines. This was a surprise to me since I thought the indented grooves would help the gripping.

What seems evident though is that for people who palm their bowl as opposed to using some variant of claw grip, the grooves on the Aero bowl will help to stabilize a bowl in their hand.