In my opinion, Bowling Sport in Australia needs a permanent home of excellence. A place where talent congregates to showcase our sport. A place where National Championships and THE most important tournaments are held in this country. The complex should include state of the art training facilities for bowlers and coaching.
Our National Body should be located there and the latest innovations to broadcast televised events would be built in to the complex.
This would be one way in which the National Body could start to take control of the sport. The Centre would help to finance costs for elite bowlers to compete in these prestigious events such as Rachuig and the Nationals through being a commercial venture during the year and then subsidizing teams travelling greater distances as well as being in a position to offer very low bowling fees at these national events which would further help to offset costs to compete.
If the sport's controlling body had such an asset, it would allow far greater latitude in the promotion of the sport at every level and go a long way to ensure the sport of bowling could prosper in the future.
The venture could be financed in many ways, such as a one off levy which offered future discount on annual fees, possible Government grants or even a sweepstakes created and offered initially to all TBA members and league bowlers across Aust.
It may even be possible to form a partnership with a Hotel Chain which would then be able to have an accommodation facility associated with the complex and the Hotel Chain gains a state of the art bowling complex as part of the development.
I believe a proposal for ATBC to buy the Rushcutter's Bay Bowl back in the late 60's or early 70's was rejected at the time.
Imagine if the Sport's Executive had the foresight to go ahead with the deal at that time, how many benefits and how much profit could have been directed back into the sport over the last 40 yrs. By now bowling in Australia could have had at least one Centre in every state, every one able to inject benefits back into bowling as a sport. TBA Centres could easily have been in greater numbers than AMF or any other Bowling Centre Operators.
It's not too late to start !
This is probably the most important post ever on this forum, unfortunately it is probably wasted here. This forum generally is not good at 'deep' issues. Certainly, and at least, it should be posted to a thread of it's own.
Unlikely as it is that anything will actually be done: seriously, it is about the ONLY ACTION which has a possibility to lift the sport out of the doldrums. As it stands, to pretend that TBA, or indeed any so called 'controlling body', can ever exercise the authority necessary to properly represent the sport, to properly finance the sport, to properly control the sport, and at the same time be totally reliant upon other organisations for each and every one of the venues, without the use of which there is no sport and no TBA, is a fantasy.
Take a deep breath and think about it. The centres do not - repeat, do not, need the TBA, but at the same time TBA totally relies on the centres. Fact!
There is almost no other sport totally reliant on the goodwill ( charity ) of private enterprise, with it's own legitimate business agenda. And there is no arguement that TBA, almost exclusively among sporting bodies is in this position.
Have a look at John Velo's post on here somewhere (
How can TBA Differentiate itself From Your Local Centre ? )relating to soccer, particularly junior soccer, and see the differences which generally apply in similar ways across the vast majority of sports. Wonder how they would survive if suddenly faced with TBA's situation.
This is doable. It really is. Most people on here would have no idea how many large successful clubs - Golf- RSL's - Football, etc., were started by a handful of blokes meeting in someone's tin shed with an idea, and setting out to raise money and interest,until their dream became reality.
If you were to delve back into it's past, I wouldn't be surprised if the Rooty Hill RSL Club started in exactly this way.