Reaction to Modern Bowling's "The Physical Game"; New coaching question.

[zdawg]

This is why most bowlers, particularly traditionally trained bowlers who were taught to come up the side of the ball to "make it hook," do not and cannot play the inside lower quadrant of the ball. Unless a traditional bowler has the time and work ethic in terms of practice, to dedicate years to developing a modern release, he is better off staying with the traditional release and develop it to the best of his ability, working to minimize "coming over the top" of the ball, and learning to stay behind the ball longer in order to project it down the lane.

Its funny because I've been doing just that my entire bowling career - fortunately for me its only been four months so correcting it will not be a problem. Last night I finally had somebody, local scratch bowler/coach (not my coach but he seems to be respected) pull me aside and explained what I was doing on my release - apparently I developed the "traditional" release by coming up the side of the ball as that "seems" like the natural thing to do to make the ball hook, at least to me.

He had me watch my buddy who joined our team and has been bowling for only a month or so, but he naturally stays behind the ball and has no issue hooking it, and while he doesn't have my accuracy and his form isn't great, and he still has trouble lining up and picking his target, he's able to bowl fairly high scores with no coaching and very little practice because his release is so much easier than mine.

That said I've decided to change my release so that I too can "let the ball do the work" (that's what the guy last night kept telling me), as my wrist is starting to hate me and I didn't really realize how easy the release is if you do it "properly" or the modern way I guess.

[RobLV1]

Mark Hammel a great coach who co-authored an article with me a couple of years ago had a great saying. In a nutshell it went something like this: the physical game of bowling is made up of 21 different elements. Twenty of them contribute about 2 1/2% each. The other 50% is the release. How true!