After 6 Years Bowling: The Status of Weight Control

For more than five years, since I took up lawn bowls, I have been consciously trying to control the weight of my deliveries, based on the reported jack length. Such was my lack of confidence concerning my visual estimation of the length of the jack that I would ask my skip each end to call out to me how far past the hog line the jack was sitting. When I was skipping, I could be quiet. I had the advantage that I could pace off this distance on my way to the mat to deliver my bowls! When I delivered a bowl, I would consciously try to control the length of my back-swing in proportion with the distance to the jack. This is not best practice!!! It is just what I thought I had to do.  I didn’t believe I could depend upon the subconscious or the intuitive to help. Well the good news is: I was wrong. Even better news is: you don’t have to worry about it. So long as you take the time, standing on or just behind the mat to visualize the expected track of the bowl you are about to deliver, then, with experience, any attempt at conscious control of your arm speed will just fade away. If my experience has any generality, you will just one day say to yourself, “Gee, I’m not doing that anymore.” I still quite regularly ask how many meters the jack is past the hog line, but now it is just to give corroborating or more precise data to my subconscious control system. The caveat is the importance of imagining and visualizing, as best you can, the path of the bowl.

When One Hand has No Bias in Lawn Bowling

While skipping my team in an interclub match played on an end rink, I discovered that one hand had no bias at all. A bowl directed down the center line that normally would be expected to move from left to right stayed straight all the way. This occurs when the natural bias of the bowl is perfectly compensated by a slight uphill slope of the rink on that hand.

Usually I offer a team-mate playing lead the choice of which hand to bowl. My reasoning is that the bowler’s peace of mind regarding the shot to be played is usually more important than some slightly improved theoretical probability of success from one side or the other. In this case, for the first time in my life, I said, “I insist that you bowl this narrow side.”

If the path from mat to jack is straight, the first short bowl completely blocks that side of the rink. To give away to the opponents the first chance to bowl that side can shut that side down for you for the full end.

In my experience this odd situation  always arisen on an end rink and is accompanied by a very wide hand as the alternative (and also usually a very heterogeneous one).