Kicking off league season 2016-17!

I'm a bit late getting to this - 11 games late to be exact - but such is the life of a husband, father, coach, and high school teacher. In any event, I hope that you'll forgive the tardiness and simply enjoy the amazing content!

I'll spare you the numbers, but let's just say that the 2016-17 league season has gotten off to a very pedestrian start. Week 1, I only made it for two games due to softball coaching responsibilities; nevertheless, for coming in with no warm up, I managed to throw the ball okay for the first official night out.

Week 2 came with a lot of excitement and anticipation on my part. Sadly, a 161 opening game took quite a bit of wind out of my sails. Last year, my lowest game of the season was a 164, so nothing like beating that (in the bad way) during the first full night of this season. Still, I recovered and shot a couple of 200+ games to finish, which salvaged the series a little bit.

Weeks 3 and 4 were pretty similar, a whole lot of "eh." Thus far, I've shot 8 games of 200 or higher, yet none of them have been higher than 226. After terrible mechanics during Week 1, I decided to go back to my old 5-step approach and a more exaggerated push-away, and I've really liked the feel that I've been able to achieve since then.

Unfortunately, I'm just not seeing anything in the way of big scores just yet. So far, the Nirvana and Brute Strength have been the balls of choice with the Mastermind Strategy (really cool ball) and Mastermind Einstein (something of a house-shot nemesis) making appearances as well.

I'm really interested to see what this season will bring. Last year, my strike percentage was down more than 3% from the previous season, and, so far, I'm down another two percent even from that number. Clearly, when you were striking nearly 58% of the time and you drop down to around 51% of the time, that's a cause for concern.

Still, I like how I'm throwing the ball, so I think that the numbers will get back up to the ranges that I'm accustom to as things move along. I'm considering a couple of ball purchases (Melee Hook, Vintage Danger Zone), so we'll see where things go with that. In the meantime, I just need to focus on throwing the balls that I have better.

With that, I'll wrap up today so that I don't burn up all of your attention on the first blog of the season. As always, thanks for reading, and bowl with Brunswick!