It’s the Backswing not the Follow Through that is More Important

The time, tunnel-vision, and introspection I have applied to my follow-through after releasing a bowl is substantial. I have attributed so many missed shots to this or that error in releasing the bowl. For example: my hand came up too high or not enough; my palm turned inward; my arm came across my body; my grip was imprecise; my little finger should be raised more or my baby index got in the way and caused a swerve. Well folks, my experience, little as it is, is that a different factor is more important than any of the usual combinations of the above mentioned putative failings. For me, it is the backswing that is overwhelmingly important. It should be slow, deliberate and critically- your delivery arm needs to be tight enough to your side as you draw it back to brush your body. Only if this happens will the bowl easily and naturally follow your aim line.
The corollary of this is to remove all bulky objects from the pants pocket on the delivery arm side. They will and should ( if you are doing it right) interfere with a proper delivery.  

The Physics of Lawn Bowling

One really doesn’t throw lawn bowls. The language we use to describe an activity is picked for convenience and broad understanding but it is not always as aptly descriptive as we might want it. We can give a wrong impression of what is required to a lesser or greater extent and this impression can perniciously stay with us. I think this is true from my experience taking up lawn bowling. The verb throwing implies that kinetic energy is supplied to the object being thrown by muscle action, the object is released from the hand and it travels away consuming that kinetic energy. A corollary of this perspective is that the point of maximum energy expenditure by the bowler must be the point of release of the bowl. I have found that this perception of lawn bowling delivery can’t make a good bowler because it is wrong.
 
Grassing a bowl is more akin to archery than it is to baseball or golf. Most of the energy that powers the lawn bowl down the rink towards the jack comes from the controlled descent to the green of the heavy bowl from whatever height you have raised it to in your backswing. In the same way, the energy that drives an arrow towards an archery target comes from the tension/energy that you store in the bow and bowstring when you carefully draw it back before the arrow is released. In both of these the energy is expended before the projectile’s release and then transferred to the projectile as it is released.

  

How Does the Skip Provide the Correct Grass for Teammates?

I was playing in a tournament an all novice triples tournament at Heritage Greens Kitchener Ontario on Sunday. One of my teammates turned out to be an excellent  junior bowler. After the first game, when I saw that he bowled better than the rest of the team, I asked him if he would skip the remaining two games because his bowls were consistently the closest of ours to the jack, but, because he was lead the opponents had many shots at displacing them. Owen and Grant made some remarkable shots but they could not overcome my extraordinarily substandard play, so we lost all our matches.

But that is beside my point here. This young  Owen fellow stood to whichever side I planned to bowl and indicated with his feet what my aim point should be. At first I, foolishly it turned out, used what I had calculated should be my line with my Vector VS bowls, but when that gave a bad outcome I tried taking the line running right to his feet. Owen was right over and over! The bowl went beautifully so long as I laid it down on this line (which wasn’t often that day). My question is: how does a skip do this? That is; choosing where to place his feet to signal the grass while looking only at the jack and then back towards me on the mat. He must be estimating the angle needed for my bowl just from seeing my previous bowl that, incredible to me, he only observed from directly behind the jack.

I ordinarily select my stare point by choosing a line based on an object or mark at the forward ditch. Owen and those like him have another method. What is it? How do you learn it?

Vices and Skips Seem to Worry Too Much about that Early Shot Bowl

Remember:  this blog is written by a novice lawn bowler who is just half way through his second year playing in tournaments so my impressions may be faulty and in need of correction and that correction is encouraged using the comments section.

I played in a mixed triples tournament at the Agincourt Lawn Bowling Club in Scarborough Ontario Canada last Sunday. The green was beautifully cut and rolled and it played very fast; as fast as the synthetic surface at my home James Garden club. If I had realized just how similar it played earlier in the day, we might not have lost that first match. But that is not what my main insight was that day.

It seemed to me that both we and our opponents spent too many of our bowls trying to hit and dislodge early shot bowls that weren’t impossible to beat with simple draw shots. Once a bowl was 8” or less from the jack everyone but the leads seemed to be trying to hit ‘jack or bowl’ with yard-on shots through the head or drives targeted to breaking up the head entirely. The result was a lot of near misses that went to the back of the rink or into the gutter. Meanwhile, the team that had the advantage of this closest early bowl was oftentimes making the situation much worse for the attackers. If it is the last two ends and you are behind, I can see that aggressive action is called for, but I am talking here about general play in the match.

My median draw bowl (the bowl that has equal numbers better and worse than it) when delivered on the James Gardens’ green is 52” from the jack. Even so that leaves quite a few that pass within or come to rest within 8”. Vices or skips will be substantially better than I am. Wouldn’t it be better strategy to just continue with everyone grassing their best draw bowls for a bit longer? Even if that early close bowl ends up being shot, it is only down one and those draw shots substantially improve the chances that the deficit will not be more than one.

Does this make sense or not?

Complaints from Leads and Vices about Skips

I played in a pretty prestigious tournament at the Toronto Cricket Club a few days ago and I can tell you there is rebellion brewing in the ranks. While the skips are down at the head, leads and seconds are talking quietly among themselves. Perhaps this has been so since time immemorial. Perhaps it is something new. I don’t know; remember, I am just a second-year novice.

But what the foot soldiers are saying rather generally is that skips don’t take account of the limitations of team members. The skips may be correct about the shots they are calling for from a tactical or strategic point of view.  No-one’s arguing about that; but, they are more often wrong about what the person on the mat is confident about trying or comfortable with. The skip cannot know we have a wonderful aim point on the side (s)he is calling you off of, or that you have no idea of the correct grass on the hand where you are being asked to bowl. The skip cannot know that there is nothing wrong with your line, you just haven’t hit it yet! Perhaps some skips should stop subconsciously trying to show off their experience and think more about the actual capabilities of their team members.

What would I do if I were a skip for a young team with partially developed skills?  I would tell them that I was instituting a new system. I would continue to signal my preferred choices of hand and target, but I would implement a system more like baseball, where the pitcher can shake off a sign from the catcher. My bowler on the mat, would just shake his or her head indicating, “I am not comfortable with what you are asking.” If as a skip, mine is only a mild preference, I would signal for the bowler to make the choice. If I felt that there was a very strong reason for what I was asking, I would call the bowler up to the head and point it out. My impression is that this would occur rather infrequently. Much less frequent for example than skips visit the head when they are bowling themselves.

As for draw games where the skips know their team members almost not at all, I think a wise skip should almost always invite a choice by the bowler. It will make the game more enjoyable for all and, I think, produce better outcomes. Nothing is really more ridiculous than for a skip to call for a refined draw through a narrow port, when the poor novice, like myself, feels lucky to get anywhere within three meters of the kitty.

Pushers: Difficulties with the Backswing When Using the Cradle Grip

Image for the comment below

The other day I was helping my coach to supervise the first lessons of new bowlers and I met a beginner who could not use her thumb in opposition to her other fingers to hold the bowl, as is required in the variations of the claw grip. She was already using a 0-0 size bowl. This lady explained her difficulty and showed me her hand. Apparently, because of arthritis, her thumb was effectively confined to the plane of her palm. The thumb was not immobile but even when it was assisted to take an out-of-plane position it had no strength to hold a bowl.  For this reason, she had to palm the bowl in what is called the cradle grip with all her fingers and her thumb on the same side of the bowl. 

It seems to me that people with this slight disability cannot dependably use the standard delivery, because they cannot grasp their bowl sufficiently tightly for a standard backswing. My pedagogical comments to her had been all, not exactly wrong but just useless. It seems to me that bowlers who use a cradle grip for whatever reason must employ a very modest to non-existent backswing; must step forward with an exaggerated long stride; and must accompany it with a matching long follow-through. The power required to reach long jacks needs to come from the acceleration in the push they apply to the bowl since they cannot use the energy (called potential energy by physicists) gained by elevating the bowl in the backswing. ‘Pushers’, as they are called, very often also begin their delivery arm motion from a stance with their foot opposite slightly ahead of the nearer foot. Push bowlers can be very good bowlers. There is no automatic impediment to their estimation of line and weight derived from the grip and delivery. I warn you from experience not to underestimate these people. If you wish to explore a related weakness, I sense that bowling to long jacks could more easily tire them on heavy greens.   

Bowling Long is Much Harder on Grass

As regular readers know, at my home club, James Gardens in Toronto Canada, I bowl outdoors on a very fast synthetic surface. My tournament matches however are played predominantly on natural grass. For this reason, I am also a member of the Willowdale Lawn Bowling Club so I can practice on that surface. When I went to Willowdale this morning, the grass was still wet with dew. I was using a groundsheet. I found it very difficult to deliver, much less accurately deliver, a bowl that maximum distance: from two meters from the back ditch to within two meters of the front ditch.
My chosen style is to bowl using only the potential energy from a high backswing, without using too much muscular energy. My arm muscles are only used to control my arm to try to maintain the aim line. My hope is that this way I will still be able to be fresh enough for multiple matches in a day even as I get even older. On the synthetic surface, I had been successfully controlling my length by hesitating at the top of a calibrated backswing, stepping firmly forward, and then swinging through to release the bowl. This worked well for the James Gardens synthetic surface because just a moderate 45 degree-from-the-vertical backswing was all that was needed for the longest jack; however, at Willowdale, on the wet green, a backswing of about 90 degrees, almost to the horizontal, seemed to be needed and this tended to throw off my line and cause me to bowl narrow too often. One solution seems to be not to pause, even hesitatingly, at the top of my backswing but to step forward briskly, plant that forward foot, and get the bowl grassed. For some reason this speeding up of the motion increased the bowl’s travel and reduced the deviations from my stare point. The reason for the greater distance, may be,  that my forward step tends to be longer when the pendulum motion is continuous. Only time and trials will substantiate or challenge this remedy.  

A Tip playing Lawn Bowls: Keep your Weight Essentially Completely on Your Planted Foot When your Backswing Begins

The Balmy Beach Fours team needed a replacement lead because of injury in one of their Ontario district playdown matches on Sunday last. I had the chance to substitute. The match was against last year’s Canadian gold fours team modified only in that Steve McKerihen, last year’s skip, was being substituted by Jeff Harding, who is the reigning Canadian singles champion. The other members of the opposition were David Anderson (vice), Adam McKerihen (2^nd) and Steve Walbank (lead). Here I was a novice, who had played exactly 12 months, getting to play with a group of the best lawn bowlers in Canada! Pretty awesome right?

Thank goodness for those two trial ends. On my second of four bowls, I grassed the wrong bias?!#
Fortunatel for me, it was very much up and up from there. Although our Balmy Beach squad lost,  our competition did win this district 10 qualification tournament; and, I think it is fair to say, we lost because our team was outmatched not just the substitute lead.

Did I learn anything that might support improvement? Well one thing is certainly rather interesting. Jeff Harding has a smooth conventional delivery, just like we novices are taught by coaches when we take up the game; except for one thing. He stands in the ready position, crouched with both feet touching the mat, but with all his weight on the leg that remains stationary during delivery. This is so pronounced that you can actually see this leg, which he will step forward onto, dangling loosely in the air just occasionally brushing the mat as he begins his backswing. This seems to compel Harding to do two very desirable things. He must take a  gradual, very controlled backswing, because otherwise he would lose his balance. Also this necessitates another simplification in delivery. There can be no uncertainty about the amount of weight that goes to the back foot in his delivery. It has to be all his weight, since his other foot is essentially off the ground.