Bowling Bytes--4/8/10

Today I begin a new feature of this blog. I'll be providing links and citations to bowling news and information that I think you may find interesting or useful. I'll be looking at blogs, websites, journals, and other online and offline publications related to bowling and pointing you to the best of what they have to offer. I'm going to try to do this every day, but I may or may not be able to do that. Yet, I should be able to do it most days. So please be sure to stop by and check it out.

~ PBA Action Continues Sunday on ESPN with PBA Experience Showdown presented by BOWL.COM -- "The 2009-10 Lumber Liquidators PBA Tour’s regular season is over, but competition continues Sunday on ESPN with the first of two special events from the new International Training and Research Center located on the International Bowling Campus."

~ Former Junior Team USA members take doubles lead at USBC Open Championships -- "Erik Vermilyea of Mansfield, Texas, and Jeffrey Mersch of Orlando, Fla., are former Junior Team USA teammates and have bowled doubles together at the USBC Open Championships for five of the last six years...Their familiarity with each other's games has helped them to continued success on the tournament lanes, including a 25th-place doubles finish in 2007. This year, everything came together for them again as they turned in their best effort yet and took the Regular Doubles lead with a 1,507 total at the National Bowling Stadium on Sunday."

~PBA.com's Xtra Frame to Continue Live Event Coverage This Spring -- "PBA.com’s subscription video service Xtra Frame hits the road again later this month to give bowling fans first-ever comprehensive coverage of several PBA Senior Tour and PBA regional events...Xtra Frame co-host and expert analyst “The Bowling Doctor” Jeff Mark will be travelling the country and calling the action for the final rounds of at least eight tournament stops beginning with the PBA Senior Dayton Classic April 20."

~ Andy Morton: PoY Comes Down to Year's Final Game...Again -- "In very few professional sports does Player of the Year boil down to one game. However, for two consecutive years on the PBA Tour, Player of the Year has come down to the final game of the final tournament...This season-ending tournament also brought to an end one of the most disappointing years for number one seeds heading into the stepladder final. The top seeds this year went an astonishing two for eight...over those 53 games, we saw the cream of the crop rise to the top. Five of the top seven players were former Players of the Year. Your number one seed was vying for his first POY award and your number two seed is remarkably the only player among the top 10 of the 50 greatest players of all time not to have a POY award. No matchplay, no bonus pins, no gimmicks. Just bowling for 53 games on seven conditions."

~ Ohio bowler records sixth perfect game of 2010 USBC Open Championships -- "Most bowlers dream of achieving perfection at the USBC Open Championships, but after a 133 start to singles, things were far from perfect for Mark Frazier of Lorain, Ohio, at the National Bowling Stadium on Tuesday...With a few adjustments and a ball change, the 36-year-old right-hander turned his dismal start into a dream come true as he closed out his 10th Open Championships appearance with 20 consecutive strikes for games of 253 and 300 for a 686 series. Frazier's 300 was the sixth of this year's event. Terrence Syring of Bay City, Mich., leads Regular Singles with 833."

~ Get More Length -- "How do you get the ball to skid farther down the lane without moving your line or changing bowling balls?"

~ Mental Game: Inside Your Head -- "Want to become a PBA champion? Take responsibility. Want to raise your average? Take responsibility. Want to become a better person? The onus is on you, and you only, to succeed or fail, win or lose, rise or fall."

~ Ong, Healy to bowl for the title in 4th Kingdom International Open -- "Healy must defeat Ong twice to win the $25,000 top prize."

~ Analyzing the Player of the Year Award -- "Every year, no matter what the sport, there is debate about who actually should've won the MVP award, or how skewed the system is, or any of a number of other arguments fans and critics throw at the governing bodies of sports...Is it best to vote, as in most sports? Is it best to make a pre-determined points system ahead of time and let the participants go for it, as in bowling?"

~ 2009-10 PBA Tour: The Season of WOW -- "This 2009-10 season was a season that lived on and off of every conceivable brink you can imagine and we all came out remembering something about what bowling fans just witnessed."

~ Attacking the sport patterns in Reno -- "The biggest difference on this pattern will be that when you use more angle in the front part of the lane (swinging the ball greatly away from the headpin), you won’t see the guaranteed hook most house shots provide. What you are going to have to do is throw the ball straighter up the lane and less away from the headpin. This isn’t to say that you have to play one exact part of the lane to have success. One of the best things about the Open Championships oil pattern is that it provides many different ways to get to the pocket, but simply throwing the ball toward the gutter and waiting for it to hook back isn’t one of them...We always try to play as straight as we can during practice, and then we try to stay as far to the outside part of the lane as we can for as long as we can. This gives us a chance to get the oil to transition down the lane where it can give us a little help later on. You also need to use equipment with some surface, but not too much. We also all play as close to the same breakpoint as possible the entire set. That way, when one of us starts to see oil transition, we can communicate it to the rest of the team so that all of us can adjust. This helps minimize the amount we have to move, since there is hopefully no one playing deeper than we are. So, whenever we move deeper, we move into fresh oil."