A Theory About the Lead’s Bowls Playing Lawn Bowls Triples

When the lead plays his bowls in a triples match at least 12 bowls are left to be played in every end. It cannot be guessed whether his team will need to be protective or aggressive. The skip and to a lesser extend the vice have indicators of how play is proceeding. What can the lead do to increase the value of those opening bowls?

I have an idea. The lead must try to create a head favourable to his side.

This is easier to do if his side has the mat but even bowling second there are superior and inferior contributions.

All three lead bowls should finish behind the jack. To increase the probability of this, the lead’s first bowl must be weighted to be intentionally long.

Since it is the plan to be consistently further behind the jack with this bowl and subsequently subtract weight to approach nearer the jack, this first bowl should be delivered so that, more likely than not, it will come across the centre line. Since the intent is to be intentionally long, the opportunity should not be wasted to possibly trail the jack!

The lead’s 2nd and 3rd bowls will be delivered with better information, both with respect to weight and line, than the first bowl. The first bowl is, in a sense, a ‘sighter’ bowl. It provides feedback about the rink conditions.

This is all that can be expected from the lead that does not possess the mat.

If one’s side does possess the mat, more is possible. It should be prearranged that the skip will decide on jack length: short, intermediate, or long, but the lead could be given authority to choose the mat position. If this permission is granted, the lead should choose the mat position so that whether a short, intermediate, or long jack is called for the jack will finish close to the forward T (2 meters from the front ditch).

Why do this? Because we have already decided the lead’s first bowl is going to be intentionally behind the jack and more likely than not, narrow, and if there is going to be a heightened chance that the jack will be trailed, the closer that trail takes the jack towards the front ditch, the more difficulty for the opposition.

If your side has possession of the mat and your skip calls for a short jack, where should you locate the mat? The answer is 2 meters behind the closest hog line, because from there you can try to roll the jack to the forward T, but even if it is 2 meters short of the T, it will still have traveled the requisite 21 meters (in Canada, 23 meters in some other countries). At the same time, you have 2 meters behind your target length before you are too long and fall into the ditch and give the jack away!

If an intermediate jack is requested, the mat position should be about 5 meters back from the closest hog line. If a long jack is called for, take the mat to the back T.

All this may be well and good, but sometimes you, as lead, will deliver a bowl short of the jack. If your line is still good and your bowl is only a little bit short, you may have a decent shot bowl! You still need to get behind the jack with your remaining bowls. 

Controlling Weight at Lawn Bowls When You Take a Stare Point at 5 or more Meters

 

For a decade I worked with a stare point on my aim line 3 to 5 meters out from the front edge of the mat. This blog article is directed towards players who do this. If you take your stare point as the theoretical shoulder on the visualized path of your bowl, then this blog is not for you!

Using a stare point between 3 and 5 meters out along your aim line has the very significant advantage that you will know definitively after your bowl has been delivered whether you missed rolling the bowl over your stare point or whether it is your aim line that is wrong.

The disadvantage of the method is that you will have no instantaneous visual clue to help you get your weight correct. That will be entirely up to your recollection of the entire visualized path from a few moments before.

About 10 years ago I was in a roll-up at Broadbeach Bowls Club in Queensland Australia and a skip visiting from Melbourne gave me a tip about controlling weight when you use a stare point near the mat. He told me that if I was trying to deliver a bowl to a short jack my stare point should be no more than 3 meters out along my aim line, but if I wanted greater length I should be choosing a stare point 5 or 7 meters out.

At the time I tried following this advice and I remember my weight control did improve but I paid attention to it less and less thereafter, mainly because it didn’t make sense; why should it work?

Recently, during a practice session, a possible reason dawned on me.

If you are delivering a bowl to a short jack at 21-23 meters and you apply enough weight to get your bowl to travel along the aim line and over a stare point at 5 or more meters the bowl will be delivered too heavy. To roll straight along your aim line and over your stare point you have forced yourself to use too much weight. Instead, with a stare point only 3 meters away, you can bowl along your aim line, over your stare point, and still only apply the correct weight needed to reach the shorter jack.

In the alternative, if you are trying to roll your bowl straight along the aim line and over your stare point 5-7 meters out, that forces you to apply more weight and forces you not to be short!

Pertinent Definitions

An ‘aim line’ is the imaginary straight line that runs from the intersection of the rink’s center line and the front edge of the mat to a selected point on the front bank of the green. The bowler selects an aim line.

A ‘stare point’ is an imagined spot on an aim line over which the bowler tries to roll a bowl. 

Getting Weight Right: Standing on the Aim Line 2/3 of the Way to the Jack

I have discovered a way to avoid short bowling by my lawn bowling team members. I do not understand why it works, but it does seem to work with a variety of different subjects.

To do it you must learn the correct aim line for the bowler you wish to assist. The easiest way to do this is to make some deliveries with that team member’s bowls before the match starts and compare the draw with your own.

Then stand at a spot on that aim line, 2/3 of the way from the front of the mat to the jack, and ask the bowler on the mat to bowl at you. For some mysterious reason, the bowl gets delivered with a weight appropriate to get it to the position of the jack!

I don’t know why this works, but I can hypothesize. The bowler senses that at least a certain velocity is needed to take the bowl to you along the aim line without substantial bending away, and that is quite a good approximation to the velocity required for the bowl to curve towards the center line and arrive at the jack. 

 That is to say, your request asks two things of the bowler:

1. Bowl along the proper aim line, and
2. Bowl with sufficient weight that the bowl does not curve away from me very much

These two demands actually indirectly define the perfect draw path. The bowl must start out on the required aim line, and it must not curve to any substantial degree until it is 2/3 to 3/5 of the way down the rink!

If you adopt this methodology in a match, the opposing skip may claim that your positioning is illegal, and the rules require that you stand at all times behind the head. This is not correct. The applicable rule from The Laws of the Sport of Bowls, Crystal Mark Fourth Edition is:

12.1.3  As soon as a bowl is delivered, a player who is controlling play from a position that is either level with or in front of the jack must take their position as described in law 12.1.2.

12.1.2  Players at the head-end of the rink and who are not controlling play must stand: 

12.1.2.1 behind the jack if they are members of the team which is in possession of the rink; 

12.1.2.2 behind the jack and away from the head if they are members of the team which is not in  possession of the rink; 

12.1.2.3 on the surrounds of the green if the jack is in the ditch; or

12.1.2.4 well clear of the head if it is not possible to stand on the surrounds.

This means that once the bowler, whose play you are controlling, releases that bowl, you are required to move immediately to a position behind the jack and then, once that bowl stops, away from the head. 

Getting Your Weight Right: Using the 2/3 Rule at Lawn Bowls

 

Delivering your lawn bowl the same distance as the jack is the most difficult skill in lawn bowls. Visualization of the path that your bowl is going to travel is the most common method taught for achieving this; but, I have found, that most players need about 6 years of experience to get this right.

For new bowlers, I have found a simpler approach called the two-thirds (2/3) rule.

As always the first step is to decide on the correct aim line. The aim line is an imaginary straight line that runs from the center of the front edge of the mat and ends at some spot on or behind the forward ditch. The new step is to focus or stare at (as best you can) a section of that aim line 2/3 of the distance towards the jack. Then deliver your bowl as if trying to roll your bowl over that spot by delivering it down your aim line.

What will happen is that your bowl should travel without much deceleration as far as this stare point, passing it on the inside, and slowing down from that point on to arrive at the jack length!

Why this works I have no idea. Perhaps our ancestral caveman intuition for how to throw projectiles controls our muscles once the target is 14-21 meters away. What we do learn from bowling experience is that a well-delivered bowl starts to slow down visibly once it is 2/3 to 3/5 the way towards the jack and continues rolling and curving in towards the target for the last 1/3 to 2/5 of its journey.

The downside of this trick is that you must give up using a stare point at 3-5 meters in front of the mat. As a consequence, it will be harder to recognize when you have chosen an incorrect aim line. 

The Lead Bowler in Triples

For the lead bowler delivering the first bowl in the end, it needs to be emphasized,: line is not the most important concern, weight is.  If you are within three feet on either side of the jack, that is probably not going to get you a reprimand, but being three feet short may. What one must emphasize is proper depth, and it is your first bowl in the end that is most likely to be wrongly weighted. It is OK to be a yard past the jack, and one should err on the side of being past rather than short. Four feet short is a bad bowl; four feet long can be useful for the development of the head. Four feet short cannot be promoted easily, so it is likely to stay out of the scoring, since the jack has an overwhelmingly greater chance of being moved backward rather than forward during the end. Grassing two bowls three feet past gives the vice and skip some things to work with in developing a scoring situation. A close bowl by a lead in triples rarely survives as the shot bowl. There are too many good bowlers to follow, and a bowl close to the jack makes an excellent target for up-shots. Even if both of the opposition lead’s bowls are 1^st and 2^nd shot, your side’s situation is not too bad so long as your lead bowls are behind the jack!  

The Strategy of Really Long Ends at Lawn Bowls

In the northern hemisphere, on slow rinks, the most frequently adopted strategy in lawn bowling contests is to deliver very long jacks when the opposing team seems to prefer something shorter. 

Even so many bowlers underestimate the effectiveness of this strategy because they do not realize how dramatically the average bowler’s line control falls off as the jack length increases. As jack length trends towards full length each additional meter of length is responsible for a greater and greater decline in accuracy. 

That is to say, many bowlers underestimate the significance of jack length because they confuse ‘longish ends’ with ‘really long ends’. I would characterize ‘really long ends’ as being only those within 1 meter or less of full length (T to T).  It is on these ‘really long ends’ that the performance of many bowlers falls off precipitously.

“Aha,” you may say, “but to gain the advantage you claim, your lead must be able to consistently deliver these ‘really long jacks.’ “

“Well,” I say, “practice it.”

 Delivering a small white ball to within 3 meters of the forward ditch without any substantial need for line control is really not very hard for anyone. Besides, all that happens if your side does ditch the jack is that the other side gets their chance, and from what I have seen they don’t pay much attention to their delivery at all!

So the situation is this. You get a chance to deliver the jack for a ‘really long end’ for which your side has trained or is naturally advantaged. If you succeed in getting the jack you desire, you are odds on to win the end and furthermore you retain the jack. On the other hand, if your side makes a mistake rolling the jack it suffers no significant penalty!

Where can you find odds like that?

That Very Significant Last Three Meters of Jack Length at Lawn Bowls

 

Just because your lawn bowling opponent(s) can successfully bowl to a jack twenty-seven meters from the mat doesn’t mean at 30 meters the same success will persist. It is that last little stretch in length that so often makes the difference.

 

Even if you are worried that you might deliver the jack into the forward ditch, it shouldn’t deter you from trying to deliver a really long jack, if you have reason to believe that that would benefit your side. Even if you do lose the jack occasionally in the front ditch and give away the mat and jack length to the other side, isn’t it better to have an authentic long jack some of the time if that is what you think would provide an advantage?

The other day I was leading for my side in a triples match where the opposing skip bowled with one knee on the mat. This meant that he was bowling with arm strength alone…..there was no possible contribution from body momentum because he could not step forward. He was able to bowl fairly well to 27 meter jacks but when the length went to 30 meters he was either erratic or three meters short. This provided the tactical advantage to win the match, even though I delivered the jack into the front ditch twice and lost the mat advantage those times. When I did succeed in placing the longer jack we were able to score several multi-point ends.

“After Four a Meter More” at Lawn Bowls

The Greenbowler blog has recently researched the effects of rain and wind on the delivery and rolling characteristics of a lawn bowl. There is another environmental factor which has some importance but it does not depend upon the weather from day to day— it changes from hour to hour.

I was reminded of the significance of this factor while watching a video from the 2023 Australian Bowls calendar. The commentators noted during the match that the competitors were increasingly leaving their bowls a bit short. They quoted an Australian saying, “After four a meter more.”

I had never heard this but it encapsulates in a memorable way an important bit of lawn bowling lore. When the bowling surface cools down its resistance increases modestly but quickly and the weight that was perfect earlier in the day, when for example it was sunny, becomes insufficient.  Even in overcast conditions, the high temperature for the day often comes between 3 and 4 o’clock. After that time you need to instruct your subconscious control mechanism that a little extra push is required!

The Ten Top Greenbowler Lawn Bowling Blogs

Ryan Bester at Broadbeach

 

I've been posting The Greenbowler Blog for seven years. Although, as the editor, I can see which of my 228 posts have been more popular this information is not readily available to readers although posts can be selected by keywords using the search tool in the right-hand column of each blog article. So below, I list, each with its own link, my 10 most popular blog articles of all time. If this proves useful and there is a demand for it, I will supply links for numbers 11-20 later.

1. The Secret to Controlled Weight

2. Strategy and Tactics at Bowls

3. Lawn Bowling from the Shooters Stance

4. Measuring at Bowls

5. Jack or Bowl: Reading the Head

6. Strategy of Leads at Pairs

7. Controlled Weight

8. Choosing your Correct Bias for Bowls

9. Delivering Bowls with a Cocked Wrist

10. Henselite Supergrip Championship Bowls

David Bryant's Secret connecting Length and Line

David Bryant has made a Youtube video teaching lawn bowling. In a snippet between 33:50 and 34:45 minutes into the presentation, he says that from his set position on the mat before delivery, his eyes switch back and forth between focussing on the stare point on his aim line and looking at the location of the jack target. He continues switching his focus back and forth between them until he feels comfortable and then, concentrating on his stare point, he delivers his bowl.

 I have never heard this advice before but based on my own subsequent imitation on the rink, I can confirm it does improve results! 

The reason it works I can only speculate. Perhaps it better links considerations of line and length into one operation. It doe not burden you to remember the required length while choosing line but rather refreshes that memory just an instant before commencing the delivery action.

Try it. I feel this is a significant insight that advances my bowling.

Updating Controlling Weight at Lawn Bowls

About five years ago, at the Turramurra LBC near Sydney Australia, when I sought help to control the weight of my deliveries, Bob Hawtree, one of the coaches, told me to study closely the distance of the jack from the mat and in my head simply ask the question, “What does it feel like to bowl to a jack at this distance? I was told this will elicit a response from my muscle memory. Then, “I should simply bowl with that memory in my mind.”

Essentially this means don’t first try estimating the number of meters from mat to jack and then putting a number on it. Rather, let your internal computer take the data from your eyes and let it control your muscles directly.

I was not spending enough time just looking carefully at the distance of the jack from the mat and letting that feed to my ‘mental computer’.

This advice must, of course, be combined with a  reproducible delivery motion. Bob emphasized three things for me in this area: the position where the bowl is released (about 6 inches in front of the advancing foot; the point in one’s swing where the step out begins (the bottom of my backswing); and the height to which one raises one’s arm in the follow-through (not more than the height of the knee). 

Surprisingly to me, this worked amazingly well for a while! I dramatically upped my game. This was in fact the most significant improvement I had made in years!

 However, because I had not been playing long enough up to that time, my delivery had not been grooved and so the resulting inconsistency muddled the truth in what I had been told. Now years later, I only need add one thing to that wisdom: get your bowl away smoothly without dumping or wobble and the results will prove the intelligence of your subconscious knowledge of the correct weight.

 This extra nugget was reinforced by the words of a former Canadian champion playing with me at Valverde LBC here in Portugal just a couple of weeks ago.

The Delivery at Lawn Bowls: Controlling Weight

My Bowls are Yellow

Controlling weight is the most popular topic of inquiry on this blog; therefore I add the following.

There is a lot of confusing advice about how to control the distance a bowl travels after you release it from the mat. I discern that one big reason for this is that the answer needs to be different depending on how long the questioner has been bowling.

What I have found is that until you have bowled for about six seasons your subconscious does not have enough experience to know how to deliver the correct ‘weight’ on its own.  That is, it is not intuitive. You need to think about each delivery and adjust elements of your physical delivery consciously. You have to think about changing something: your bowl elevation, length of step, degree of crouching, whatever. When you read advice to make these specific adjustments, you need to understand that this advice is for newer bowlers who are just learning the game or bowlers who have made significant changes in their physical delivery.

Once you have been bowling for some time, (for me it was six years bowling year-round), these instructions do not apply. In fact, they are harmful. 

Your delivery should have become grooved by then. There is now another group of advice articles that apply. They will tell you something like the following:

 

You need to flood your subconscious mind with confident messages. Your body should relax. Let your conscious mind deliver reliable data to your subconscious (the wind, the green speed, the position you want the bowl to stop). Consciously set yourself properly on the mat; visualize the path for the bowl; then as you begin your delivery turn control over to your subconscious. Your conscious mind should go blank. You are ‘in the groove’. Your body spontaneously just does the required thing!

Until the delivery has become as natural as walking or driving a car, these latter instructions are madness. For newer bowlers, they just confuse and lengthen the learning process. For bowlers who have grooved their deliveries thinking about the physical mechanics, trying to control weight with the conscious mind blocks progress.

The Delivery at Lawn Bowls: Weight Consistency and Line Consistency All in One Magical Step

I have achieved a quantum leap in my lawn bowling performance that has not been matched by anything since I adopted the Shooters’ Stance several years ago.

Here it is. Clear and simple. Look at my diagram (I am left handed-so you will have to adjust for right-handed delivery).

From the Shooters’ Stance, I select a stare point about 5 meters in front of the mat line on my aim line. Nev Rodda in his second video explains that the Shooters’ Stance teaches that you should ‘aim’ with your forward stepping foot.  What I have found is that you don’t just generally point that foot along your aim line, you carefully point it precisely at your stare point and when you step you step out placing that advancing foot right on the line running to that stare point. Then, two good things happen. First, your bowl passes more consistently over that stare point, and second, more amazingly, because your advancing foot is completely aligned with the stare point your body smoothly rocks forward. Your weight transfers smoothly first to your heel, then the ball, and then the toes of that foot as you walk off the mat. The result is remarkably improved weight control!

Previously, I was stepping forward but my foot was sometimes not properly pointed. The result was that I couldn’t smoothly roll my body weight forward into the delivery so I got a varying contribution of body momentum for each shot. This meant I couldn’t control the initial velocity of my bowl.

There is more good news! Because line and length are so much improved my confidence is over the top and this allows me to think authentically positively about the outcome of every shot and when you believe you can do it, you just do it!

Delivery at Lawn Bowls: Subtracting Weight

Steve McKerihan is a perennial player on Canada’s Commonwealth Games Lawn Bowling teams and a frequent coach for lawn bowling skills development. He is also the father of Kelly McKerihan one of the premier lawn bowlers in the world.

Last week we were in a group chatting after a mens’ interclub match and he mentioned that a dependable way to take off weight, when your previous bowl is a meter or so long is to deliver this next bowl with the same arm speed and body weight transfer but to not stay down when you deliver your bowl but to start to rise as you release it. The reason why this should work is that by lifting your body as you release the bowl, you transfer some of the horizontal energy which is what moves the bowl down the rink, into a vertical component of energy that is wasted. As a consequence the bowl doesn’t travel quite as far.

The physics of this was immediately incontrovertible to me. Furthermore, this is why you are told to stay down throughout your delivery if you don’t want to be short. I said to Steve, “On Youtube I have seen top bowlers not staying down and I thought they were making a mistake.”

“No, no” was his reply, “they are just subtracting weight.”

Well, I’ve been bowling seven years now and I’ve attended weight control clinics and I’ve never heard this. What’s more important I’ve been trying it and it works!

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.

Proper Visualization of the Course of Your Lawn Bowl: the Final Secret to Controlling Weight

Barry Pickup says, “Study the track your bowl takes en route to the head. Learn that track, memorize it. Learn to visualize that track before you deliver a bowl. A properly delivered bowl will always follow the same track unless deflected by a foreign object or uneven green. Learn that track well and you are a long way towards bringing a bowl to rest exactly where you want it.”

Before a high-performance lawn bowler delivers a difficult shot, you will often see him or her standing about halfway down the rink looking at the head or walking backwards towards the mat. What is going on in that person’s mind?

I think after examining the head from near the forward ditch, the expert bowler has already made up his/her mind what shot to try. This close up looking from the direction of the mat most probably relates to the visualization of the shot. From the mat, the crucial details of the last few meters traveling of the bowl cannot be visualized. Often the bowl has already disappeared from view among the other bowls.

Before starting to roll your actual bowl, you should have rolled an imaginary bowl and followed it on its path all the way to its final resting place. It may seem like a waste of time. You may be put off because it seems no-one else is doing this. I resisted for five years! There is no obvious logic in it; but, it will improve your weight like nothing else will.

Weight Control at Lawn Bowls according to Ralph Ellis

by Ralph Ellis

The following article concerning weight control in lawn bowling was written by Ralph Ellis one of the Canadian lawn bowls coaches. I think it may be of interested to many readers, particularly bowlers with five year’s experience or less. Weight control articles are among the most frequently referred to on the Greenbowler blog. 

“How do I control my weight?” David Anderson's reply was “There is no “magic solution in a bottle. You have to discover it on your own.”

David's answer was quite correct but after the session I told David Burrows that I objected to us not being more specific about the mechanics of weight control. David logically said that I should write an article about the mechanics and work with the coaching team. That is where this comes from.

How do lawn bowlers control their weight? The simple answer is that we do it exactly the same way that golfers, basketball players, baseball pitchers, and quarterbacks do it. We feel it.

When LeBron James sinks a jumper fifteen feet away from the basket on the left side of the court, he does not measure where he is standing, check his angle, and then make the shot since by the time he does all of that, there are two defenders there. By constant practice and natural ability, he knows what it feels like to release the ball from that distance and angle and he can tell you if it is going in or not long before it reaches the basket. The more of a natural athlete you are, the simpler this process is.

One of my more interesting coaching discussions about weight control was with Kevin Jones back at the WOBA in the 1980s. I asked him how he controlled his weight. Kevin replied, “I throw it harder or I throw it softer.” I laughed and said “Yes Kevin - but how do you throw it harder or softer? Do you keep your step and swing the same but vary your arm speed or do you keep your arm speed the same and vary your step and swing.” Kevin looked ticked off and said “What do you mean? I throw it harder or softer.” Kevin and I were speaking a different language.

The three most natural lawn bowlers that I have seen in my lifetime are Kevin Jones, Dave Houtby, and John Haggo. Each of them steps up and instinctively throws the bowl with apparently little thought. This does not mean that each of them does not practice hard to produce the results that they have gotten. What it does mean is that natural athletes in any sport automatically gravitate towards automatically using feel to gauge distance and weight.

What happens if you are not a natural athlete? What happens if you are me? I never played any high school sports and aside from some talent in long-distance running, I never really displayed any inclination to sports at all. I did lawn bowl from 12 years old and I am by nature analytical.

The two big theories on weight control when I started playing in the 1970s were:

1) Ezra Wyeth – keep the step and swing the same and vary arm speed and

2) R.T. Harrison and the theory of elevation – keep the arm speed constant and vary the height of the stance, the length of the swing, and the step.

Wyeth's approach is simpler and quite frankly, probably the correct approach; however, I felt more comfortable with Harrison's views and based my delivery on it, including winning a Canadian Championship in pairs. It worked for me because I was younger and more athletic than I am now so the complexity of the movement was less of an issue.

On fast greens, I bent my knees and kept low to the ground.

On slow greens, I stood up straight and took a big backswing.

Complexity does create issues as you age and when I returned to bowling after a five-year hiatus at 54 years of age, I found that the old delivery did not work for me anymore.

Rod Carew was one of the great hitters in Major League Baseball. He had 4 different batting stances depending on what type of pitcher he was facing. He won four consecutive AL batting titles. How many players copied him? Virtually none. His stances worked for him but teaching it to other players is a nightmare. For athletes in almost all sports, simplicity is the key to success.

The more that you limit the number of variables, the better your odds are of having a repeatable, dependable delivery.

Wyeth's approach is very similar to the South African clinic style where players have the lead leg slightly in front; step and plant the lead leg along the grass line and then push the bowl up the green.

Why do we not see this simple delivery more in Canada? Because our greens are so slow with over 90% falling below 12 seconds, players have difficulty sending the bowl up the green with just arm strength and also need to add a large backswing and a long step on heavy greens. South African greens average 12 to 16 seconds, so a set, controllable delivery makes more sense in that environment. If you are going to have a simple delivery, that keeps the step and swing the same and relies on arm speed in Canada, you will have to devote some time to physical fitness. Yes, you may have to do push-ups and chin-ups to be able to reach a full-length jack on a 9-second green in Canada.

If you want to succeed in our sport, you will need to devote some time to fitness. Anyone who has a longer competitive career in our sport keeps in shape. There are rare exceptions to this rule but playing out of shape is not a way to get an advantage.

After you have the basic physical tools in place, how do you develop your sense of feel if it does not come naturally to you? Start by putting the jack away. Go out on the green. Relax and throw a bowl in the most comfortable manner for you. Pay attention to how it feels. Step up and do it again without worrying about distance or targets. You will quickly notice that most of your bowls are tending to fall at a similar distance. This is called “Natural Length” and it is the first step to discovering weight control.

Most people when relaxed can duplicate one particular length again and again and this is their favorite length. Some people have more than one natural length. I have four. These are the same lengths that I throw again and again in competition.

Step one is duplication. Teach yourself how to throw the same length repeatedly. You may discover that you have more than one favorite length just as I do. Practice duplicating these lengths.

Step two is adjustment. Take your natural length(s) and start adding or subtracting weight from them paying attention to what it feels like each time that you add or drop weight. What you will notice over time is that you can tell if your bowl is heavy or light within a second of it leaving your hand. I have often told people after I deliver that my bowl is two feet heavy or one foot short just after delivering it.

Pay attention to your bad bowls as well as your good ones. That short bowl that you threw in a game may be the length of the next jack toss.

Gradually, even if you are not a natural athlete, you can teach yourself what different weights feel like and what the adjustment from these set weights feels like as well.

This is the “Magic Solution”. Teaching yourself feel.

There are some other factors to keep in mind. You want your delivery to be as smooth and fluid as possible. The enemies of weight control are:

·         sudden jerking of the arm at the end of the swing

·         standing up too fast as you release your bowl

·         dropping the bowl instead of releasing it on the ground and

·         chasing your bowl or leaning into your delivery to add weight.

On this last point, you will say “What about all of those champion Scottish bowlers who keep chasing their bowls?”

You can chase your bowl if you chase it the same way each time or if you only chase your bowl after it is fully delivered and on its way.

Overall your delivery should look the same each time without any jerkiness or extra motion.

I will also mention that keeping the step constant is critical for maintaining your grass line and release point. Try delivering a bowl but take a different length step each time. You will quickly notice that your grass line is changing constantly. A constant step not only helps with weight control but also keeps your bowls on the line that you intended.

Anyone who has played against me can tell you that I am a 30% better player when I throw the jack. This is because I get my weight for my first bowl from the jack toss. I will do a second article on how to do this but, in essence, to throw a bowl the same distance as a jack, it has to be thrown anywhere from six feet to nine feet heavier than the jack to reach the same point. I will not get into the mathematics of this in this article but it is the next step to becoming a great lead or singles player.

Now that you have the magic solution, what will you do with it? Go out and practice, practice, practice. In most sports, the ratio of hours practiced to games is about four or five to one. This is a good starting point for developing your game. See you on the greens.

The Control of Weight at Lawn Bowls

For the novice lawn bowler, the first consideration in bowl delivery is the control of line or learning to take advantage of the particular bias of your lawn bowl. I suppose this is the first instinct because the arcing path of the lawn bowl is its most distinctive, and non-intuitive feature. As beginners we expect an approximately round object to roll approximately straight! When we find it does not but has a controllable arc and when our instructors offer an insight into how to master this, doing so is our first desire. However, more significant for how close to the jack the bowl ends up, is the influence of the initial speed or ‘weight’ with which the bowl is laid down.

Very few instructions enumerate all the variables that determine this initial velocity. Barry Pickup in his PDF file names them all although he does not provide them in a clean list and all he says about selecting some combination from them is “The fewer variables you allow into your delivery technique, the easier this muscle and memory training will be and the more accurate your bowls will be.” 

This article contains one sentence that is actually at odds with my own observations. Pickup says, “Since the position of your arm as you assume your stance on the mat has an effect on the amount  of back-swing you use and thus the degree of arc in your overall delivery swing, this is a good place to start your adjustments for varying weight and the distance your bowl travels.”  My own bowls teacher has a very gradual, very measured backswing that is quite unrelated to the position of her arm as she takes up her stance on the mat. I have adopted this. Where I start my pendulum motion is fixed and completely unrelated to how large or small my backswing is. Nevertheless, Pickup’s is the most complete presentation I have found and the most useful to me.

The elements that contribute to the distance a bowl will travel are:

 back swing elevation
degree of crouch
length of your stride
release of the bowl above the grass
rotation applied by fingers if any
arm bending at the elbow
added muscular acceleration from the arm
wrist bending at release if any


I have tried to list these in the approximate frequency with which I have observed them. Most deliveries are some combination of the eight elements.