This isn't a simple of an answer as money being the only obstacle. While we could say that money is the final issue that is the easiest to point to, you have to build up exposure for the game before you can get more money. Looking at the 2006-2010 Tournament of Champions the ratings are just not that good (not that this is new news).
http://blog.timesunion.com/bowling/m...elevision/119/
As it was mentioned if a big brand could be convinced to be a sponsor it would help, but there isn't the return necessary for a larger sponsor to do this. The average cost of a commercial on some of the major networks is as follows (all 30 seconds):
ESPN: $19,301
FOX: $200,008
ABC/CBS: $94,000
NBC: $76,211
Taking the average number of viewers for the 2006-2010 stretch 877,000 and the Average commercial spot for ESPN you get $0.02 per viewer. You can adjust this down per viewer by saying that the commercial cost is lower on Sunday afternoon, but then adjust it up for the % of people watching this on DVR and fast forwarding for commercials. 19.8 million viewers were the average for football (
http://www.coldhardfootballfacts.com...gs-2011/12798/ ), which would turn out to be a $396,000 commercial for the same $0.02 per viewer rate. Essentially if a larger sponsor thought that the PBA was appealing they would buy up a lot of the available spots on ESPN because of cost effectiveness. Thus you are stuck with in a circle of we need more money to become more popular, but we need a higher popularity level to get more money.
Looking at the common answer for building up the game, getting more kids to start up bowling, you can see many of the same difficulties. The biggest difficulty is getting kids interested in bowling over other sports and activities. Bowling is at a great disadvantage to many of the other sports (football, baseball, basketball, golf, etc.) because of exposure on television. During baseball season and basketball season you can turn the television on almost every day and watch a game, football is an activity that entire families will watch together (which is on the same day as many bowling events), etc. The second disadvantage is the ease of play for basketball, football, baseball...grab a ball and walk to the park or play in the front yard. Kids are not dependent on adults to take them to a specific location as they are in bowling. Lastly, there are many schools and locations that do not have bowling teams; since these programs are not established it would be difficult to get schools to take them on; too many districts are trying to find new and creative ways to cut expense at this time, I don't think they would be as open to adding new programs and expense.
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