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.
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