Our Sunday League offers big first place mone, $15K.  Weekly fees are $30.  Kegel Challenge series.  Nobody complains, even though top average bowlers are lucky to avg. 215 instead of 230 they do on house shots.  Guess what happened to the lower average bowlers?  They're averages dropped also.  Yet our league stays steady at 20-22 teams.
 
Lowering the scoring pace of bowling as a panacea to "heal" bowling is just so patently simplistic and would prove to be so ineffective over the years the idea should be dropped immediately.  What proponents of that absurd idea forget is skill is skill, higher skilled people will still score higher than lesser skilled players no matter how much the overall bar has been lowered or raised.  It's all relative.  I have no idea why some people can't get this thru their heads.  Our league experience proves it.

The reasons that bowling membership is down have already been mentioned.  High scoring isn't one of them.  I also don't know of anybody hat quit because of scores being to high but there are some people that I sure wish would so they'd quit posting the same nonsense over and over.

Quote from: txbowler on April 27, 2013, 06:18:45 PM

Would it be a safe connection of the dots that due to the rise in scoring pace the bowlers who quit, quit because they were no longer guaranteed a victory by their skills?  They were not making money? The new balls and easier lane conditions brought more bowlers pnto their level.  Fairly or not.  Not debating that.  Simply that since they were not making as much money, it was part of the equation.

That's what I'm getting at, yes.  But you're completely right in saying that money is THE issue right now.  I'm just saying the scoring pace heavily contributed to that.  Yes, the more skilled bowler will still win the most, but not nearly as much as they *should* be. 

Nobody is happy in bowling right now because of the money.  Yeah people want to win, and yeah some people are in it just for fun, but the payouts at the end of the season still factor into it.  Nobody is going to sign up for something guaranteed to lose them money.  The handicap system is broken because there's a wider gap between the lows and the highs.  It's hard to accurately and fairly distribute handicap when the differences are 70-80 pins as opposed to 30-40.  Scratch league participants start leaving because accuracy is no longer a premium, with today's technology it almost puts you at a disadvantage because of how much quicker you burn up your shot.  Then those leagues get smaller and eventually disappear, so now those bowlers either have to quit or start bowling handicap leagues.  If they take their 225+ averages into handicap leagues where it's 90% of 220, then the 180 and lower averages start getting upset, because if they bowl their average and the 225 bowls their average, 225 guy wins every single time.  So instead of practicing to become better, they sit back and demand more handicap.  225 guy has a problem with this, because it's harder to shoot 225 than it is to shoot 180.  180 gets a can opener and a brooklyn and all the sudden they're over 200, 225 could never miss the pocket but get tapped and shoot 200, but that means they lose by 20 or 30, plus they put a lot of time and effort into having that kind of an average so they believe they SHOULD win the majority of the time.  So it swings back to the 180 average saying they can't compete with 250+ games the 225 shoots with average frequency without more handicap.  It's a vicious cycle that goes on and on, everyone is begrudging everyone else's circumstances. 

So basically what I'm saying is that our current situation is the symptom, very accurately observed, but it's not the disease.  If you still don't agree, I won't argue any further, but I do appreciate you at least understanding my viewpoint or the point I'm trying to make.  What you said is a big part of my angle on this subject. 

That's a good point about sanctioning.  People just join a league, and if it's sanctioned, they whine about it and pay their money, but that's as far as it goes. 

And yes, your last paragraph is correct.  Just like if you let a kid eat cookies and candy and cake for a solid month then try to make them start eating healthy, you're gonna have a bigger fight on your hands than if you'd just moderated it in the first place.  The USBC is in a no win situation, but they put themselves there. 

Yes, bowling has priced itself out.  You don't just walk in and bowl, it's bowling, shoes, food, it's an event that doesn't last very long and costs a lot.  A benefit though is that it IS indoors, and I think that's why open bowling is starting to pick up more.  Unless it's 70-80 degrees outside, nobody wants to be out, so what do we do?  We go bowling.  But at the same time, we are talking about league bowling, not open bowling. 

If you don't think scoring pace has anything to do with it, then you aren't very competitive, you show up to have fun, and you aren't worried about your payout at the end of the year.  Scoring pace may not affect or bother you specifically, but that doesn't mean it hasn't already made people quit in droves.  I'd say a 7.3 million drop in membership over 15 years qualifies as quitting in droves. 

Tell people prize funds are disappearing and that will make more people quit than a tougher shot will.  Everything has become so middle of the road that it's costing people money.  Scratch bowlers aren't making as much as they used to because of handicap.  Handicap bowlers can't make any money on their road to improvement because the big scores are too big.  There was an annual tournament here years ago, 1st was 1000 bucks, and the entry fee was 80, with side pots, high game pots, brackets, etc.  The last 3 years it was in existence, it took a minimum of a 258 average for NINE GAMES to take first, with a high the last year of 261.  The tournament folded because they couldn't get anyone to show up any more.  We also had a fairly prestigious tournament that the finals were actually shown on local tv, and it too fell by the wayside because the numbers were outrageous.  We used to have 3 pretty big scratch leagues in town, and people would even come watch.  The longer they went, the higher the scores got, and the people that used to come watch because they wanted to get into the leagues stopped coming to watch, and never considered joining because "I can't shoot scores like that all the time."  So tell me how none of that had to do with scoring pace . .