Teaching Beginners Lawn Bowls a New & Better Way

I have discovered a new approach to teaching new lawn bowlers.

From what I have seen, this method leads more quickly to an effective, consistent paradigm that works for fast and slow surfaces, different body types, and different ages.

It starts with what is most familiar to beginners and adapts that to the more unfamiliar elements.

It starts by having the students roll jacks from a standing position on the mat aiming to send them smoothly down the center line of the rink over a chalk mark three meters in advance of the front edge of the mat. The jack is perfectly round, no different from objects these people are already familiar with such as baseballs, golf balls, or tennis balls. The goal is familiar also— precisely directing the ball along a desired path.

All that needs to be added to the instructions is the request that the jack travel between 21 and 30 meters and that it not be bounced on the bowling surface. The distance requirement will enforce the need for some backswing and the requirement for rolling will require the lowering of the body to bring a hand near to the rolling surface.

For the teacher, an added advantage of starting with jacks is that there are usually many more of them available for instruction and one does not need to start out struggling with different size bowls. All students can roll from the same collection of jacks. At this stage, it doesn’t even matter if some jacks are the heavier ones for playing on synthetic surfaces while others are the smaller lighter ones for playing on grass. 

If you fancy it, the teacher can at first let everyone experiment with how they get a jack smoothly past 21 meters down the center line. Once they recognize how difficult this is to reproducibly do, then you can demonstrate how you propose they learn to execute it! The reason we bowl the way we do is because it works better than other styles. It isn’t just convention or tradition!

Once your students can properly roll the jack, only then is it time to introduce the bowl itself.