I feel for the Seniors on this one.
Seniors bowl all year on ditched up house shots and have a great time living the dream. The trouble with living the dream is that you must remain asleep. When you play all year on patterns that place little to no premium on accuracy, prediction/adjustment, power or repetition, it must come as a very rude shock when you hit something as demanding as this year's nationals pattern, which required all these elements. So it's no surprise that some folks had a hard time. And I feel for them. They've been deceived by easy shots all year and now they face the music in a public and pretty painful way. The organisers that set up events on 10:1 house shots are the ones who should be ashamed. Because you can't have your national championship on a house shot. It's about real bowling to challenge all grades of player. Start running Senior events on 8:1, then 6:1, 5:1 etc. patterns and pretty soon, people will get better. Scores will be lower at first. So what? Scores are relative to conditions. Players will improve.
While we're all asleep playing tournaments on our comfortable house shots, the rest of the world isn't looking at their watches waiting around for us. They're getting better. Meanwhile, we are stagnating in our little pond.
They get harder. We get softer. And the gap widens with time.
I'm with Lawrie. I too failed on this pattern. While I dislike medium length (37-40 foot) patterns, I failed because I threw it pretty poorly. I look to the tired looking guy I see each morning when I brush my teeth for answers, not the lane man. I'm going to have a short rest and get back on the practice lanes with a good coach. I respectfully suggest anyone who bowled below expectations at the Nationals do the same.
And by all reports, a lot of people just didn't move their feet and target. Then it really is hard. I tried every conceivable part of the lane. Some things worked. Others didn't. What didn't work for me, worked fine for the straighter guys and vise versa. It wasn't that hard. It just wasn't dead easy. If we had laid down something easy, we'd have seen a carry contest, with some folks averaging 260+ on it. Michael Mak did just that recently. Purvis' lads from Hong Kong would have murdered such a pattern.
The international players were, by and large, better than us. That's why they did so well. But we had some admirable local performances. I see our guys giving it a better shake next year. There's a lot of encouragement to be taken from this year's event.
Try. Fail. Try. Fail Better. Try. Succeed. Try. Triumph.
Cheers,
Jason
p.s. If the oil had been higher viscosity, I suspect (and I'm guessing) that the middle would have hooked even more downlane, making it nastier. This would be a good thread for tech talk! Phluff, it was really hot in there by all reports during seniors week.
