Journal - ABT Recap - 2-6-2022

Disappointing but productive outing at the ABT in Denver today.

After bowling so well in the City Tournament I made the last minute decision to make the nearly 2hr trek to roll this weekend’s ABT at Crown Lanes.

It started of great, picking right up where I left off on Saturday, so what I learned there is sticking. The end of game two stated getting a little sloppy and that carried over into game three and four. At this point I don’t think it was me not necessarily rolling it well, but more like I wasn’t recognizing bad ball reaction and making bad choices.

One of those bad choices was not rolling the spare ball in practice. Problem is it takes a me a while to loosen up, even with prior stretching, and then get lined up, I don’t want to “waste” any time. Not needing to roll the spare ball at a right-side spare until game three, it took me 3 missed spares to realize my spare ball was hooking too much and I needed to make a drastic change.

Bad choices number two… possibly not using the right ball or not making the change at the right time. I think my Venom Shock was still the right choice for the first game. At the end of the second game it started to get a bit touchy and even worse in the third game. I tried making moves but one of the problems is I’m usually playing right of where everyone else is so when I need to move for transition, I end up moving into where everyone else has already played and has broken down the oil pattern.

So I need to either make bigger moves when moving left or step down to a weaker ball and move back right. This time I opted for choice B and changed balls and moved right for the fourth game. I was in the right area, but again the ball was just too touchy. I fought it for 8 frames. 9th frame I was at the point I had nothing to lose, I grabbed my urethane and fired it up the 1st arrow… a little light in the pocket, cleaned up the spare. For the 10th frame I moved right and fired it up the 4 board and proceeded to throw 3 clean strikes.

Damnit! If I had used that ball earlier, possible even started with that ball because almost no one else plays that far right, I could have made the cut. If I had picked up just ONE of those easy make-able spares in the third game I could have made the cut.

I am starting to realize I’m getting to the point where it may not always be my physical game that’s the problem. I may just not be matched up with what I need to be doing. Right now, with my inexperience, the differences are oh so subtle, but the more I do this the more I’ll figure out what I need to be looking for.

So while I didn’t bowl as well as I would have liked, 245–200–160–176 for +99 with handicap, it was an excellent opportunity to evaluate my game, how I’m retaining what I’ve learned the last week, and gives me ideas on other areas I need to work on in the future. As always, it’s more experience to build on and I’ve really been getting so much out of my experiences this last year.