Look, Ma, I'm On YouTube!

As regular readers (if there are such crazy people) of this blog know, I love to bowl. I bowl in a league that challenges us with roughly the same oil patterns that the professional bowlers face in their televised tournaments. Those patterns are considerably more difficult than the patterns that most of us bowl on in practice and league because they require one to be more accurate and consistent than one would ordinarily have to be to get strikes and spares.

For instance, on the typical bowling center shot, if you throw a hook, you can miss your optimal target several inches left or right or be off with your speed and often still get to the pocket for a strike or convert your spare. On the PBA Experience patterns, if you miss even slightly to the right of your target or throw the ball a little too fast, your ball is likely not to hook to the pocket, and it will often miss in such a way that you are left with a difficult spare conversion. If you miss your target a little to the left or throw the ball a little too slow, your ball will usually hook past the pocket and often leave a difficult or impossible split to convert.

Even though it can awfully frustrating at times, I enjoy pitting myself against these patterns because it encourages me to improve both the mental and physical aspects of my game, and it makes me appreciate more just how good the professionals on TV really are.

The woman who runs our league is one of the outstanding bowling coaches in the country and has developed a tremendous junior bowling program in our bowling center. In my league, both adults and juniors participate. She recently decided to make a video of our league and put it on YouTube. She compiled the finished product from footage gleaned from two consecutive weeks of bowling. I appear in four parts of the video, wearing one shirt and long pants in two of those parts, and shorts and a different shirt in the other two parts. One of the parts shows me throwing a warm-up ball at a full rack of pins. I will not say any more than that. Enjoy. :-)