Helping a Teammate without saying a Word

I think it is bad form to offer another player advice during a roll-up game of bowls. But sometimes it is possible to improve a person’s performance without saying a word.

Recently, I was skipping in a game of drawn triples. I had no knowledge about my other team members. In fact, I hadn’t ever met them. In the first end, I signalled my lead to deliver forehand and he brought his hand across his body in the follow through and the bowl almost left the rink after it cut across the centre line. This was repeated twice more, even though I was giving him grass with an allowance for this difficulty.

I never signalled for another forehand the whole rest of the match— always backhand, no matter what the situation in the head. Intuitively, people do not bring their arm across when bowling backhand. His weight was good, and he made a significant contribution in the remainder of the game!

Only afterwards did I tell him what he needed to fix on his forehand.

Take the Full 30 Seconds

 

I was bowling in one of the district playdowns last week in Toronto, and sitting at the table next to me in the clubhouse, a coach from the Canadian National Bowls team was telling some competitors whom she was coaching to visualize the path of their contemplated delivery and not to deliver the bowl until this was clear in their minds.

This got me thinking: could a person improve performance simply by taking 25-30 seconds to prepare for each delivery?

 This would provide sufficient time for multiple visualizations that would move one’s gaze back and forth between a stare point (say at 3-5 meters in front of the mat) and the jack.

Doing this as part of a delivery routine would very likely dramatically improve proper concentration, and that would provide benefits to all the players with less than perfect discipline.