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Last time, I made the claim that
there are four things, namely, confidence, experience, adaptability
and focus, which set the pros apart from the rest of us. This time,
I want to illustrate some of the specific details of why these qualities
are so important and provide some examples that bowlers aspiring
to improve their own games might use as a benchmark for tracking
their own progress.
First, let us discuss confidence. There is a reason why I mentioned
this one first and that is because I feel it is the most important
quality. The main difference I see between the pros and amateurs
is that the top pros treat confidence as something which they are
constantly managing and evaluating, while amateurs typically allow
their confidence levels to wax and wane unchecked. What I mean by
that is, for the top professionals, in order to win against the
best competition in the world it is absolutely paramount that confidence
is at a peak. Of course, even the best bowlers in the history of
the PBA win less than 10% of the PBA Tour events in which they compete,
so the trick for the pros is how not to allow all that failure to
work against your confidence for your next performance. The way
most of us accomplish this is through a cycle of honest assessment
of every performance followed by a determination of what is needed
to improve, followed by a corrective action. But the underlying
foundation of this is a sense of purpose and drive that you will
accomplish your goals. The coexistence of these two things together
will allow you to manage your confidence in a way that keeps it
building while minimizing the peaks and valleys.
Our next quality is experience, and I place this one second is because
it is so closely interwoven with confidence. In bowling, maybe more
than any other sport because of the constantly changing conditions,
experience is of immutable valuable. Since so much of your success
in bowling depends not only on execution but on maximizing your
margin for error (both on the lane and with pin carry) having a
wealth of experience to draw upon is going to give you a huge advantage
in scoring well and competing. How does one gain this advantage?
Simple! Go out and bowl! The more you practice, bowl in leagues
and tournaments and study the game, the faster you'll gain the experience
you'll need to get better. One of the most obvious reasons the pros
are so good is because they spend the most time doing it. It is
truly amazing how quickly the pros can find the right place on the
lane that will give them room for error. On league conditions, the
lanes are typically dressed in a way that makes it obvious where
to play, but on PBA conditions, this is not always so apparent.
Despite this, the pros are still able to manage incredibly high
scores, which is a testament to the ability to discover margin for
error and utilize it to maximize scoring.
Adaptability, of course, is a quality that goes hand-in-hand with
experience. In fact, you might even go so far as to say that without
adaptability, experience isn't much use to us at all. The pros understand
that conditions are constantly changing and that there will always
be someone in the field who is going to figure out the right combination
to the condition to set the scoring pace. If you are not willing
to adjust your game to the conditions, then you are conceding defeat
and might as well not even continue competing in the first place.
The key to becoming an adaptable player is to constantly work on
learning new ways to attack the lanes. My rule is to never walk
out of the bowling alley lost or without a plan for how I would
attack a condition on which I struggled the next time I might face
it. If you do that, you'll find that the solution to scoring on
conditions on which you never thought you'd be able to compete will
begin to come to you more frequently and more naturally. But you
always have to keep an open mind and be willing to change if you
believe something better and more conducive to higher scores comes
along.
The last quality in which the pros exhibit such incredible skill
is in the ability to focus. On the PBA Tour you discover quickly
just how much money a simple lapse in concentration can cost you.
It is absolutely amazing how much the difference in one or two pins
a game over a week of bowling is equivalent to in terms of dollars.
I think the main advantage the pros have in the ability to focus
is that they are constantly working toward goals. Whether its winning
the tournament or winning the match or earning money, those things
all help creating incentive for a player to focus on the task at
hand. Of course, one must be able to distance oneself from those
thoughts during competition, but setting performance goals helps
enormously in improving the ability to focus.
I hope these insights will help you in your own quest to become
a better bowler. But even if they don't, I hope they remind you
of why the pros are so good at what they do. |
