I bowl for the championship again and put up some of my worst scores ever

Normally, I am a pretty good bowler. I am just coming off of a month where just a few weeks ago, I bowled the highest score I have ever done in over 20 years and the 2nd highest score of my life.

Well, yesterday was kind of proof that doing well one week doesn't necessarily transfer into me being better all the time, because I put up numbers that show that not only did I not put up a good competition for the reigning champ, but it didn't look like I belonged in the top league at all.

We had a pretty good turnout yesterday with a lot of new faces as well as some people that haven't been in a little while because of the bad weather we have been having here. The weather is about to turn bad again so I don't think this improvement in attendance will continue.

I was stoked to get going on my matchup against the current champion but he was a favorite going into the game anyway because he has a better average and is generally more consistent than I am. I still thought I would put up a pretty good fight and after the first game I still thought I might.

I got a 143 which isn't great but still around my average, and my opponent got a 160. A mere 17 points behind, this is what we call a "one frame game."

Normally, I end up doing better in my 2nd game than I do in my first because I have usually ended up figuring out the oil patters of the lane I am on at that point. Unfortunately, that was not at all the way things panned out in game two.

It didn't seem to matter what I did, I just kept getting some really bad luck on my first ball and I even bowled a gutter ball twice, which is something that almost never happens to me. I was way off on my spare attempt pickups and while a lot of this can be attributed to the oil not being correct at the lanes we go to - we always say that you have to play the course you are on - just like in golf.

_{I still hold the piggy though, for getting 4 strikes in a row a few weeks ago}

By the end of game 2 there wasn't really any reason to continue to watch the showdown between me and the guy who I was up against. He bowled an impressive 169 and I had a year low of 83.

While some people wouldn't mind getting an 83, this is unbearably low for me. It is almost unheard of and I haven't bowled below 100 in 2025 until yesterday. I kept attempting to adjust my game, adjust my stance, adjust my grip on the ball, even changed balls, but nothing that I was doing worked. It seems like every adjustment that I made was an over-adjustment and when I was trying to get the ball to move just a few inches in a certain direction it would move wildly, like several feet, in that direction instead.

I was trying to figure out what it was that I was doing wrong, or doing inconsistently, but here we are a day later and I still don't have any idea.

It certainly didn't help that I kept getting horrible splits as well.

src
_{this is a 6/7/10 split, and it is almost impossible, even for pros, to convert this}

The split pictured above happened to me twice in one game and I converted neither of them. On one of them I guttered.

I am not a person that throws a fit or quits when he is going poorly but it started to get quite embarrassing for me because I am considered by the entire group to be one of the better players in the league and at the time was currently bowling for the top belt championship yet there I was, bowling worse than most of the people that are in the league below mine.

src

There's another kind of leave called either a "sleeper", a "twofer", or "hard wood" and they are really tough to pick up because you have two pins that are one in front of the other. This is difficult because unless you hit the front pin dead on, the pin is going to deflect at an angle, thus not hitting the pin behind it, and/or the ball is going to deflect and not hit the pin behind either. There are a lot of ways to do this one correctly and to completion depending on how you bowl, but there are far more ways to miss it. I would imagine that in our league that this has about a 30% conversion rate but for me yesterday, I ended up with 4 of these and it wasn't until the tag-team game later on that I was able to convert any of them.

Other people bowling that day managed to do quite well including one guy that I nicknamed "The Sniper" who rolls remarkably light and slow and it is amazing that he manages to knock down the pins at all. He is like me in that he is very inconsistent in his scores but yesterday he managed to win the lower division championship in his head-to-head matchup, and now he is promoted to the premiere league where I am with 6 others.

I miraculously managed to not get demoted because your demotion is determined by the highest of your first two games. Whoever ends up with the lowest high-score of those two games gets demoted.

My 143 in game one was high enough to keep me from getting demoted as 2 other members of the premiere league managed to do worse than that with the 114 that one of our guys got being a horrible score for him as well. I don't think he cares about getting demoted and he is good enough that if he wants it, he will be promoted back to the top league before you know it.

bowling can be a really frustrating sport to be a fan of because just like golf, one day you are awesome, the next you look like it is your first time ever playing the game even though you feel as though you are doing everything exactly the same.

I suppose if there is any good news it would be that there is no way that I am going to bowl worse than this next week. I'm disappointed in myself for managing to bowl a sub-100 game even though I am considered by most to be the 2nd or 3rd best bowler in our group.

Oh well, today's a new day! Time to take Nadi for a walk!