8 Games of Awful : (

I love long formats, strong fields, and challenging lane patterns. With that in mind, the 8-gamer at Town & Country Lanes in Joliet, Illinois should've been right in my wheelhouse since it featured bowlers like Ron Nelson Jr., Robert Flaws, and Rick Hara and the challenging USBC Open Championships team pattern from 2015 in El Paso. Sadly, my enthusiasm exceeded my execution by leaps and bounds on this day, which led to another long and painful outing on the lanes.

I'll spare you, and myself, the pain and suffering of the game-by-game breakdown on this one. Instead, I'll give you the broad stroke. Despite having bowled on this pattern last May in El Paso, I was completely lost coming out of the gate.

I tried to play the outside portion of the lane, which tell you how dumb I can be since that didn't even work for me in El Paso. After missing the head pin in both directions during each of the first five shots, I switched to my Melee (the ball I used the most in El Paso), moved left, and began to get my bearings. Once I did so, it began to look like I had some clue as to what I was doing, but I wasn't nearly consistent enough to ever get anything big going. By the time the day had ended, I walked away -211 (an average of just under 174/game) and much closer to the bottom than I was the top.

So, why did it all go that way? Well, first and foremost, when bowling on Sport patterns, I just don't strike nearly enough. I threw a paltry 26 strikes over the course of 8 games, which, obviously, breaks down to an average of a little over three strikes per game. Simply put, that's not good enough. When you're only striking three times each game, you have zero margin for error. Sure, spares are very important, and, sadly, I missed my share of those too (nice job not bringing the plastic ball, big guy!), but, again, even if I had been better on spares, three strikes per game was only going to bring me up the ladder in terms of respectability, not the final standings.

The interesting thing about this is that I'm actually looking at this revelation as a good thing. It's a good thing because, sadly, I have often struggled during events like this because I get nervous/tight, which causes me to guide the ball rather than cutting it loose. Well, what this teaches me is that I may as well cut it loose because guiding it isn't going to lead to strikes, and a bunch of spares is going to do nothing more than give me an okay average that still misses the cut. As such, I need to commit myself to being more aggressive and simply going for it. On my good days, that's going to lead to a lot of strikes and an actual chance at making some noise in the standings, and on my bad days, it's going to lead to some epic fails. Then again, what's the big deal? You can average 140 and miss the cut, or you can average 185 and miss the cut. The end result is the same, so who cares what number is in front of it, right?

Brass tacks, I'm going to use this experience as a jumping-off point that leads to more confidence, more aggressiveness, and, hopefully, more competitiveness. I guess we'll see if that's the case the next time I take to the lanes for tournament action. Stay tuned!