Today’s theme for the bowling blog is practice. What do you do for your practice for bowling? I have to admit this for everyone to see, I am shocked at what coaches do for practice for their teams. I have seen it all and this is some of what bothers me. Practice time to me is for the kids, I can’t tell you how many coaches I’ve seen that use the time for themselves, the coaches are out bowling with the kids and I’m not sure why, now maybe for a fun day or something it is OK but I’ve seen coaches actually working on their own games during a high school practice session. The other thing I’ve seen is coaches that just sit back and let the kids bowl, no instruction, no structure, just go throw the ball. Kids with no structure or goal are going to screw around, thrown the ball with the wrong hand, between the legs, you name, I’ve seen it, what are they learning by doing this? My idea of practice is this, practice is when I do my job, it is the time I get with the kids to teach them something, more than any other time, this is when you need to be teaching and the kids need to be listening and doing. I plan every practice before I get to the bowling alley, every practice has a purpose and/or goal to achieve and for certain reasons. I think if you ask some of my players they will tell you our practices are harder than the competitions and that is on purpose. How are you going to get any better if you are never challenged? So guess what we do in our practices, we challenge the kids and the team, they have consequences if they don’t achieve things. For example, we will have them bowl a Baker game as a team and if they don’t bowl 200 they all have to do sit ups. You would be amazed at how focused they become when they have something to do. Another twist to this, if anybody on the team misses a 1 pin spare, the entire team has to do lunges, things like this make them focus that much more and makes the practice worthwhile. Yes we do drills, stand at the line and swing the ball, one step drill, push away drills and other things but you can only do so much with the drills, at some point you need to start working on the mental side of the game, that is the part I like to work with them on by challenging them. This is always something I have done and it has worked wonders for years, at the end of practice I challenge everyone on the team, everyone has to throw a strike to be done and nobody can leave until everyone is done. The first time I did this I had kids freaking out, crying and telling me this was ridiculous. After I calmed them down and everyone finished it they started asking for it, what you will see is the bowlers who struggle with this will start to get encouragement from the rest of the team and before you know it they are all doing it with no problem. If you can get to the point that they all can throw a strike with no problem, then tell them they have to throw 2 strikes in a row and see what happens, it is amazing what this will do for your team. My main point of this entry is to tell you that you only get a limited amount of time to practice with your players, don’t waste the time you get. Practice should be hard and should be structured, find some things that your bowlers can do or work on so that nobody is sitting around with nothing to do, there are plenty of things to do that will help.
Today’s lesson on how we became a successful bowling program is getting people involved. What I mean by this is that you can not do everything, it is impossible to build a successful bowling program by yourself. You have to get some help from people, so make sure you ask the right people to help. I had an idea that I wanted to have a JV team that was being developed to get ready to become varsity bowlers at some point before they graduated. How do you do that? Find someone to coach your JV team and tell them what you want them to do, for me it was, develop the JV team by working on the fundamentals of bowling game, get them the correct equipment, teach them the basics and don’t worry at all about winning. I have told my JV coaches over the years that I could care less if they ever win a match, as long as the kids are learning the fundamentals and getting ready to become a varsity bowler, that is the only thing that matters. Now here is an important point, whomever you hire to become your JV coach has to be able to teach the kids what you want them to learn. Don’t hire a coach that has their own ideas on how things should be ran or what should be taught, this will never work, they will undermine you and your program will take a step back, not a step forward. A JV coach must understand that they are a JV coach and their job is to get the kids ready to bowl on varsity someday. I was very fortunate to have what I will consider the best JV coaches work with me for more than 7 years. Scott and Stephanie Gruener agreed to be my JV coaches and helped our program become the best in the state. Our JV program grew from 1 team to 2 JV teams under their guidance. We had kids coming to try outs like never before with these people helping out. They both showed a genuine interest in the kids and taught them the basics of bowling and made it fun for them. They also opened my eyes up to show me how important it was to have that JV team and to do what we could to make sure they were getting recognized for their accomplishments. Scott and Stephanie had many good ideas on how to raise more money in fundraising so that their JV teams could do more, bowl in more tournaments and get nice uniforms like the varsity teams. Scott and Steph have since retired and I have hired a few new coaches who have continued the same ideas. They are continuing to teach the fundamentals and get the kids ready for varsity some day. Please remember that some kids will not ever get to the point that they will compete for a spot on varsity but that is OK, you still need those kids in your program and what does it hurt to have them. I have heard some coaches say well if a player can’t make it to varsity by the time they are a junior you should just cut them, they don’t do your program any good, I totally diisagree. Why cut them, let them continue to bowl and have some fun as long as they want to. In bowling they have a JV state finals tournament and bowlers no matter what grade they are in look forward to that. Main point is to start a JV team, hire good people to help you out, people who have the same ideas as you and develop players for the future. You have to have someone who is willing to work with the youth for nothing more than the pleasure of helping out because we all know that coaches are not making much money if any at all.
Today I want to tell you some things we did to become successful over the years. So my first year of coaching I was new to all of this and really had no idea what I was getting myself into but I knew I wanted to be successful at it. So what I did was ask around and watch. What I mean by this is I looked for the teams that were good and then went and asked what they were doing to get to this level. The one that sticks with me was Sterling Heights Stevenson, they had just won the first of their back to back state titles when I pulled then coach Tom Stockton aside and I asked him, what are you doing that makes you successful? His response was fundraise, fundraise and fundraise some more if you want to be successful. I said for what? He said so you can sign your kids up to bowl in all the tournaments that they can all season long, the more they bowl the better they will be. I went back home and said OK we are going to get the team together and go out into the community and ask for returnable cans to help raise money so we can go to some tournaments. I asked the team and parents to help out and that first year we collected enough cans to raise $700 and we sent our kids to a couple of tournaments. My next thought was, the school doesn’t have money to pay me as a coach, and they provide nothing for our bowlers, we had to buy shirts and pay for everything on our own so why not start a booster club and start trying to raise some money so that we could offer the sport of bowling to kids at no cost to them. The next year we formed a bowling booster club, registered it with the state and the school and began fundraising. I asked other booster clubs some of the things that they did to raise money and got some ideas to get this going. Here are some of the things we have done over the years to raise money. We continued to collect returnable cans and tried to do that over Thanksgiving weekend because we knew people would be home and spending time with family members so they should have more cans to give during a holiday. We also tried selling t shirts but this was not very profitable, the thing that really took off for us was the Charity Mania Football tickets. I actually got this idea from the Lake Orion band boosters because I bought a Charity Mania baseball ticket from them and the more I looked at this the more I thought we could make this work for us by selling the football tickets. We still sell these tickets to this day and annually make at least $2,000 selling these tickets. Our annual bowling fundraiser is also another great fundraiser. The bowling alley splits the cost with us and every year I say I would like to make at least $1,000 for our bowling fundraiser and we seem to make more than that with a lot of donations from parents and local businesses. One thing we do for our bowling fundraiser that seems to work is ask our parents that are good at making things to make something for us to raffle off, for example one guy makes corn hole boards for us to raffle off and people love corn hole so it is easy to sell tickets to a corn hole game to raise money. We also raffle off new bowling balls, and one time had a local plumbing business offer a new toilet with labor to install it to raffle off. You never know what you might get unless you ask. Another great way to raise money was to have a lock in fundraiser at the school for younger kids. I was amazed at the amount of money we made from doing this, basically what it is, is we have games set up in the gym for kids to play and we hire a life guard for the pool and offer swimming. The kids pay a fee and come to the high school and play games and swim and you get a cut of the door, this fundraiser annually makes very good money. There are many ways to raise money and you have to do what works for you. We now have a large group of parents and students that are willing to help when needed. We have worked the Michigan Renaissance Festival selling food to raise money and more recently we have sold t shirts at the Back to the Bricks car cruise to raise money, we also have made and sold Kettle Corn at the high school football games to raise money. I can tell you that our annual budget for 6 bowling teams is now up around $15,000 and we raise all of that doing fundraisers and now all of our kids, varsity and JV bowl in as many tournaments as they can during the high school bowling season, this has really paid off for us. Bottom line is that if you can offer to a kid in high school that this sport will not cost you much at all, it is easier to recruit them to come out and bowl. Basically the only thing they would have to pay for is a bowling ball and some shoes
I get asked all the time, what are you doing that makes your bowling program so succesful? Here is one of the things I do, and when I tell people how I do it, they seem to like the idea but very few coaches ever adopt this idea to run their team, because they want the ultimate say in who gets to play. When I started coaching my kids were not on the team, they were still in elementary and middle school but I knew that someday they would be bowling for me and I did not want people to say, well his kids are bowling (starting) because he is the coach. I also wanted a way to justify why I had certain players on my team and I wanted a way that if a parent questioned the athletic director or the school why their kid was not playing, I could justify it and the school wouldn’t have to question my choice. So this is what I started doing when I started coaching, and still 14 years later, this is what I do. In my mind, bowling is an easy sport, you write down the scores and keep a running average, how much easier can it get right? Keep track of scores, every time a player bowls a game for score, write it down and keep an average, whoever the top 5 averages are, that is who gets to start on your team. Now this can change throughout the season and this is when it becomes interesting, in a good way. So I normally have about 20 kids show up for try outs, I write down all scores and take the top 7 kids for varsity and the rest form a couple of JV teams. Let’s say that Susie is 6th after try outs so she is not a starter. After week 1 Susie now has a higher average than Mary who was 5th after try outs. Does Susie just automatically get to start, No she has to earn it and here is what we do. Each week, we designate a day (before the season even starts) as our practice for score day, it is actually a league day. When it is league day, we will have what we call challenge matches, a challenge match means that if someone is out averaging another player on the team in front of them, they can challenge them for their spot. So in my example, Susie gets to challenge Mary for her starting spot. They bowl 2 games for score and if Susie beats Mary she now moves up to the 5th spot and becomes a starter and Mary would move down to 6th. A couple of side notes here, what I do is tell them that the match is 2 games total pins and the person who is challenging the person in front of them, must beat them, if the match ends in a tie then nobody moves spots. Another side note here, a player can not move up or down more than 1 spot per week, so if Susie is now averaging higher than 2 more girls on the team, she can not automatically move up spots, she must beat the players in front of her 1 at a time to move up. Here is what I think about doing it this way. You as the coach now have taken the decision of who gets to play out of your hands and put it in the players hands, they decide who gets to start now, how can you be questioned now for Mary not getting to start, she had her chance to defend her starting position, if she loses it’s on her, not you. Now when Mary’s parents question you, all you have to do is show them the scores, when Mary’s parents don’t like it and they call the school and complain that the coach is not being fair, show your athletic director the scores, there really is no argument, the scores tell the story. Here is something else that this does for you as the coach, it makes practices worth something, you are not just throwing the ball for no reason, you have your team bowling for scores (that count) toward their averages. It also is a simulation for match play, which if your bowlers go to state finals they will have to bowl against someone in match play. If your bowlers have been through matches in their practices, it makes the match play much easier for them. You can’t simulate match play any better, it really gets the adrenaline flowing for the kids, because they all know that it means something. It creates competition on your team which is a good thing, not a bad thing. This is the biggest complaint of coaches when I tell them this is how I do it. Most coaches are afraid it will tear their team apart if you make them bowl against each other. I disagree, it creates competition on the team and if you don’t have this, your team will become lazy because they know they don’t have to work for anything. I have seen this system make a girl who was a 180 average bowler become a 190 average bowler because she wanted to remain a starter and she knew if she didn’t continue to work harder than the girl behind her that she would lose her spot. Many coaches tell me they would not use this system because it does not take into account an attitude, I don’t disagree with this, you could potentially reward a player with a bad attitude that is a good bowler, that is when you as the coach have to work on the attitude. Ultimately, as the coach your job is to put the best players on the lanes and if you use this system you will be, it may take some time for the players to work through the challenge matches but during a high school season you typically have 10 weeks to do that and by the time you get to the end of the season, it will ultimately line up so that your top bowlers will be at the top of the average list. One thing I recommend, if you are going to keep a running average of all of your players, publish the list so everyone can see it, parents, players, athletic directors. This way there is no hiding what is going on and everyone knows. I publish my list on a website for everyone to see. If someone has a question, they can go to the website and see for themselves what is going on. As for the attitude question, you are the coach, you ultimately have the final decision of what happens on your team, if you think that a players attitude is abd and will cause problems then you must address this right away by making rules and stick to them. I am not saying that this is the way every team should run, all I am doing is telling you how I ran mine. Some schools are lucky to get 5 or 6 players to just try out, they don’t have to worry about players moving around because they don’t have enough players, in this case, using this system wouldn’t do much good. I was in that situation when I first started, didn’t have many players but the selling point to all kids is that everyone has a chance to make varsity when try outs begin and even after try outs are complete, players will have a chance to move up.
Today I would like to address the reality of being a high school bowling coach and what are some things you can do that will help you be succesful. I want to touch on the idea that you do what you say you are going to do. First of all, everyone has their idea of what they would do if they were the coach and how things would run if they were in charge, the reality is when you are put in charge things change and people change and you have to figure out how to address this on the fly. The easiest way for me to face this is to do what you say you are going to do. For example, if you tell the kids you will bench them if they miss practice, you have to bench them if they miss practice – no matter what, follow through on the threat. Do what you say you are going to do or things will turn bad quickly on you. I have seen and experienced issues with this. If you have a superstar bowler on your team and they miss practice and you have a big match against a rival coming up and you decide, I need that bowler to be able to win this match so I’m going to let them bowl, you just lost all credibility with your team and your parents who support you, you just put winning above everything else and that is not what you want to do. On the other hand, if you bench your star bowler because they missed practice, you send a message to everyone that you will do as you say and the rules are the rules. Think about this, the people you are coaching are going to grow up and go to work for someone someday, if they are taught at a young age that it is OK to do whatever they want, that there are no consequences, they are not going to end up being a very good employee. Here is my example of what actually happened with me. I have a rule on my team that you must be a meet at least 15minutes early, preferably 30 minutes early. For the most part everyone always shows up at least 30 minutes early, but I give them a little break by telling them they have 15 minutes, so if they are not at a competition at least 15 minutes early they will be benched. I had a very good player show up about 2 minutes before the beginning of a competition so I benched them. The players on the team, all instantly gained respect for me as the coach, because I did what I said I was going to do, they all understood that this means if they did this that they would be benched and this also showed all of the players that nobody is bigger than the team. This turned into some trouble as the parent approached me and started shouting at me that it wasn’t fair that their child was being benched, it wasn’t the players fault that they were late, the parent said it was their fault, not the childs fault. My response was, I guess you better leave earlier next time, we will discuss this after the competition. The parent continued and threathened to pull their child out of the sport, I stood my ground and said the rules are the rules, next time get here on time. Ultimately this incident made my team stronger and made the program stronger just by following the rules. If you are a coach and you are running a program and you are looking to get something from this entry, get this out of it, just do what you say you are going to do and remember this, you can NOT please everyone, this is for sure. Someone is not going to like your rules but if you do what you say you are going to do they will eventually respect you for it.
OK, so a few year’s back the proprietor of Richfield Bowl Jim Teuber told me I should start writing a book on what it is that I do when coaching my high school team, so others get an idea how to run a bowling program. So this will be the beginning of those writings. I am starting my own blog for others to read and get an idea of what I do through out the year to get prepared for the season and what we do during the season. Here we go, take this for what it is, I know not everyone will do things the way I do them or see things the way I see them, everybody is different, but if this helps people out in any way, it is worth it. These are the things I think you should do as a head coach or the leader of a program, whether that be bowling, basketball, volleyball or whatever sport it is you will be leading. First and foremost, if you have been hired to be the head coach, you are now the face of the program whether you like that or not. You are the one people will look to for answers about everything and anything with your sport, your school and your athletes, don’t take that responsibility lightly. Here is how I feel about that with my position, I am the head coach of the Kearsley girls bowling program, every kid that wears a Kearsley bowling shirt is representing the school, themselves and me. This means I want kids in my program that are good kids, ones that have integrity and are willing to do the right thing no matter what. Kids that will follow the rules and be leaders at school and in the bowling alley. They need to know they are representing the community when they wear that team jersey and people will be watching. Now here is what I believe is the important part of this message, as the head coach, this also means you must do the same, you are representing the community, school and all of the kids in the program, so have some integrity and do the right thing….always. Don’t put winning at all costs in front of doing the right thing, trust me, if you do the right thing, winning will come. I see too many coaches that worry about winning more than anything, this will only get you in trouble. Side note here and maybe a little bit of a secret but where would you go in a high school to find kids to recruit to be a part of your program that will fit what I described? This is what I did, it might work for some but might not work for others, I recruited kids who were in the National Honor Society to come join the bowling team. Some people say why did you do this, here is my thinking. Kids in the National Honor Society are more than likely not involved in a lot of sports because they are more worried about their grades, this was fine for me as a bowling coach because I could tell them, look our sport is not all that physical, you don’t have to hit or get hit by someone, we only practice a few times a week (not everyday) and we have 1 or 2 matches a week. Kids in the National Honor Society are willing to work to get good grades which also means they are willing to work to learn new skills, we can teach them how to play a sport, it is easier than trying to teach someone who thinks they already know everything. If kids are in the National Honor Society and they are a part of your program, you don’t ever have to worry about them being ineligible to particiapte because of their grades. So if you are in need of some players to build your program try to find out who is in the National Honor Society and see if you can recruit some kids to come out and play, you will be very surprised at how that might turn out.
Here are a few ideas from Coach Ploof on what to do to build a successful bowling program.
1. Communication is the key. Communicate with everyone, student athletes, parents, athletic director, proprietor, other coaches and anyone that will listen. Tell everyone how your going to run your program and then (here is the hard part for most coaches) do what you say your going to do, don't alter your plan. If you say for example that your rule is if a player is late they will not start, you must follow through with this if someone is late, no matter who it is, if your star player is late, bench them. It sets an example for everyone that nobody is better than anyone else, it also sends a message that you will do what you say your going to do. 2. Surround yourself with good people to help. You can't build a successful program by yourself, you need help, good help. People who all have the same goal as you. If for example you hire a JV coach who doesn't like the way you coach, they will undermine your goal and destroy your program, you need someone who understands what their role is and they must be willing to help. This is where #1 also comes into play, you need to communicate with your help, tell them what you need them to do and show them, don't just expect people to figure it out. One of the best moves I ever made was to hire Scott and Stephanie Gruener to be JV coaches. They are just great people, Scott is an Eagle Scout and they are always willing to help people, they understood what the ultimate goal was and always supported me even if they didn't agree with it, this was very important to our success. They are by far the biggest reason why the Kearsley girls bowling program become one of the best in the state. You also must have full support from your partner and by that i mean your spouse. If your spouse doesn't like you coaching it makes it very difficult to be successful. Your spouse can be your biggest fan, a person to lean on, bounce ideas off of our even your assistance coach. I was very fortunate for years to have my wife as my assistant coach. She was awesome, always supported me and kept me in line and gave me some great advice. Meet the team was tonight at the high school. Teams are set and the season is ready to begin. First match for varsity is Saturday, December 7th @town and country lanes.
Your coaches have been working on the schedule for the upcoming season and it appears we have most of it worked out now. Thanks to the Brandon coaches and the coaches at Swartz Creek we will now have a couple of the Metro Conference matches during the week so we can still bowl in the tournaments in December up in Bay City. Only thing left is to figure out an opponent for the first week of the season s
Coach Ploof ordered and received a bowling buddy for practice. This bowling buddy is a training tool for learning to relax your swing, Kearsley will now have (2) of these for the team to use.
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