Reaffirming David Bryant’s Secret for Line & Length at Bowls

 

Some ideas are useful. A few ideas are extremely useful. The “few” can get tangled up and hidden in the “some”! The Greenbowler blog’s objective is to bring forward suggestions for how regular bowlers with ambitions to excel can speed up the process and avoid wrong thinking.

Some time ago I drew my viewers' attention to a lawn bowls instructional video presented by David Bryant and pointed readers toward a small section where Bryant explains precisely what he is doing when he sets himself on the mat and gets ready to deliver his bowl. You can call up that blog article here and that blog provides a link to the actual Bryant video.

I said then and I repeat with more emphasis and more evidence now that I have found that the procedure Bryant teaches enabled me, today, at the Willowdale Lawn Bowling Club, to improve both my line and my length control in a practice session to an astonishing degree.

I thus elevate his teachings to one of the few extremely useful ideas!

Gaining an Advantage by Noting the Margins of your Lawn Bowling Rink

 

A skip can get some helpful hints to guide match strategy by examining the two meters of green closest to the front and rear ditches on the rink assigned for play. This applies particularly to club play where the tending of the green is less scrupulous than for greens that host open, bigger-money tournaments.

At some clubs, the rink margins slope so severely towards the ditches that it is difficult to stop a bowl from ditching once it approaches these edges. When this is the case, you can only play a normal game using short or medium jack lengths. If you do secure a long jack, short bowls are no longer so disadvantageous because the number of bowls behind is going to be lower.

At my Etobicoke club in Toronto, in an effort to regrow the strip at the edge of the green, the greenskeeper has left it longer than the main central portion. Consequently, there is a distinct slowing down of both jacks and bowls as they enter this fringe and many fewer jacks or bowls run over into the ditch. Skips could use this to improve the chances for many shots by moving the mat up the green for their medium and short jack lengths so that the jack is spotted for these lengths two meters from the front ditch. Thereafter the whole team can confidently deliver bowls behind the jack with reduced risk of losing them in the ditch. If the opposition does not recognize the situation they will likely end up with more short bowls!

An even more common situation is to find greens where the edging material (either metal or wood strip) that supports the grass at the edge of the ditch has become elevated above the grass surface creating a lip that inhibits and frequently stops bowls from falling into the ditch. Such a condition is particularly good at preventing jacks delivered long from dropping off the green. 

The Magic of Finding a Distinct Stare Point to Control Bias at Bowls

 

Writing a blog about lawn bowling brings one back over and over to the same subjects- things I have talked about before. But these are so important and yet in my own practicing I find I lose sight of their importance and fall into those same bad habits and then wonder why I have a streak of bad bowling.

So when I let something important slip I assume that the same can happen for my readers and perhaps it is worth a reminder.

Here in Toronto Canada, the lockdown is ending and bowling clubs are opening their greens for practice alone and for singles. There are still lots of precautions even though most of the bowlers who are going to show up have been fully vaccinated.

I was out on the outside carpet at James Gardens LBC today. It was lovely sunshine and I was safely alone, locked inside the fence-enclosed green. I had just received my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine that very morning.

My weight control was good but my line control was appalling. What was going wrong? As it turned out I was having trouble holding my stare point. Earlier in the season, the green had been dotted with maple seeds so it was easy to pick a visible stare point. Now, they had all been blown away into the ditches, and because the carpet is so consistently uniform I was having trouble picking out some physical discontinuity to use as a stare point.

This reminded me that I had already written a blog teaching how, if one had control of the mat, one could place it at a distance up the green so that some remaining distinctive spotting could become a visible stare point. When I did this and combined it with a complete pre-delivery routine good bowling magically returned! 

Controlling Length from the Shooters’ Stance

At lawn bowls controlling the weight of your shots is both the most important and the most difficult skill. I have had more success doing this when I deliver my bowls from the shooter's stance. Recently while practicing I realized that because the shooter’s stance allows one to observe the extent of one’s backswing you can check it during a practice swing immediately before delivering a bowl.

Combining

 (i) a clearly visible stare point

(ii) a calibrated backswing 

(iii) making sure that one’s advancing foot is firmly planted before the forward swing begins and

(iv) keeping your follow-through  rigidly consistent

 gives one excellent control over the length a bowl travels.