Boatmans 2024-2025 season

[boatman37]

Well tonight was our end of season league tournament. We bowled 3 3rds and finished them in 2nd, 8th, and 3rd. Pretty good for a team with only 2 bowlers with extensive experience.
But on to tonight. It was a very rough day. Our team is me, my son and my step-son, along with a few others. This morning my step-sons best friend was killed in a car crash. We had called him our adopted son since he spent all holidays at our house and his mother passed away a few years ago and he had no other family other than a brother that he wasn't real close with. My step-son showed up to bowl just to keep his mind off of things. Aside from that it was also my step-sons birthday. My son coaches his sons T-Ball and he had a game tonight so he couldn't be there and another guy couldn't make it cause his wife had surgery the other day so we only had 4 of us so had to use a blind score which is -30 below average. My son had a 176 average so he got a 146 for each game.
We were on a pair I'm not usually that good on. Started with the Altered Reality up the 2nd arrow. Started with the first 3 or 4 then started struggling. 1/2 way through game 2 I moved out to the 7 board and started hitting the pocket pretty consistently. Then as I said about 7th frame of game 3 my insert popped out and I didn't realize it until the next frame so had to grab my Ember then took the AR into the PSO to glue it back in but the Ember looked so good that I stuck with it and struck out with it. I also noticed I struck out in the 10th in all 3 games but I also missed a few spares that I shouldn't have.
But at the beginning of the night I told the team that we were there to have fun and not get mad if we struggled. Bronson would want us to have fun so we did. Also, ironically, I told the team if we could average 950 scratch for the night we should be in pretty good shape. Well we had 948, 966, and 932 for a 949 average...lol.
First place was the team with the 241 and 227 average bowlers. I saw the 241 guy had a 760 tonight. They ended with (handicap scores) 3583 and we had 3518. We ended up 2nd of 1 teams and that's with taking a 30 pin per game penalty for the blind score.

I set a few goals for me for next year. 1st is to bowl a 300, 2nd is to average over 210, and 3rd is to be over 80% on 7 pins. The first 2 shouldn't be a problem. I'm averaging 211 since January 1st and I feel a 300 is close. However, I only made about 69% of my 7 pins this year so that one might be a challenge.

EDIT: I just looked and last year I was 75% on 7 pins so even if I can get back to that that should bump my average up a few pins.

Game 1: 204 (8 strikes, 2 spares, 2 opens-1 split)

Game 2: 221 (8 strikes, 3 spares, 1 open)

Game 3: 246 (10 strikes, 1 spare, 1 open)

Series: 671

Average: 223.67

Running average: 202.21

Last seasons average: 202.61

First ball average: 9.53

Strikes: 72% (26/36)

Spares: 60% (6/10)

Single pin spares: 60% (3/5)

Splits: 0% (0/1)

7 pins: 100% (1/1)

7 pins season: 68.70% (90/131)

[boatman37]

Ordered a new Harsh Reality pearl today. Plan is for it to replace my Altered. It has about 90 games on it and in my experience mine lose power between about 125-150 games so the HR will sit on my shelf until the AR starts to struggle. So I'll have that and the Ember and for my league that should be ok. My AR is 50x3.625x30. I think I'll go with a 50x4x30 on this one since reviews say it reads slightly earlier then the AR. But probably won't be drilling it until after Christmas