Thursday League: April 2, 2009

This was the last night of our Thursday night league (except for the roll off, which is this coming Thursday, April 9). I had worked out that I needed to bowl a 634 to finish out the season with a 180 average over 84 games.  This had been my goal at the start of the season and one which I had thought was completely out of reach just eight weeks ago. Some how, everything just seemed to come together as the season began to wind down and I managed to bowl five 600’s and a 700, which went a long way towards raising my average, since it was only in the late 160’s, with the 700 adding about 2.5 pins!

I was a little nervous about bowling tonight as it would be the first time I would bowl league with my new Dexter SST 8’s. I had bowled two open sessions with them and was struggling to get comfortable with the combination and new, extended foot slide. To add fuel to the fire of nerves, our car broke down en route to the center, so we were late and frantically trying to contact someone to transport our car back to our house, meaning I could focus on just bowling.

So after I finally my gear out of the locker and got a few practise shots out of the way, we got started with the game. I was comfortable with my line on both lanes and set about knocking down pins.  Unfortunately, things did not go well. I was struggling to carry and whats worse, I struggled to get comfortable at the line making spare shooting difficult.  I ended up missing a simple single pin spare wildly to the left.  This would be a trend for the rest of the night.  I finished the first game with a woeful 156.

The second game started much the same as the first one had finished, but by about the fourth frame, I had settled in to a rhythm and managed a four bagger, then nine spared the eighth, then struck out for a solid 244.  At this point, I felt in a comfortable position to shoot the 634 I needed to get my 180 average for the season.

The third game was unfortunately an absolute mess. I had lost my shot and had gotten in to what has been the trend this season of throwing the ball way to hard. I left a great number of simple spares and missed just about every single one of them.  I finished this game with a measly 159, some 75 pins short of the 634 I was aiming for. I finished the season just 0.9 pins short of 180, for 179.1 over 84 games.  Not a bad effort, but definitely room for improvement.

All that is left is the roll off.  I think, if I include the roll off, I need to bowl a 615 to finish with 180 over 87 games.  We’ll see how it goes next week.