As some of you may recall, after accumulating 70 career perfect games, 33-year-old Florida bowler Mike Aleshire -- after some of his 11-in-a-row starts -- began deliberately "throwing off" in an attempt to roll every score between 290 and 300.

He had another 11-in-a-row start last week, so what happened this time?

http://www.examiner.com/article/three-perfect-games-and-a-pair-of-299s-highlight-this-week-s-high-score-report?cid=db_articles

Haha, bingo.  Definitely on the same page here, exactly the same deal for me.  Laziness isn't as much of a part of it as the local community.  Nobody wants to give up their big averages because we have something here called "Top Ten."  Every year before the season starts in August, they take the top ten composite averages in the city from the year before and have a tournament.  This goes from youth all the way up to seniors, with mens and womens divisions for each.  This tournament has NO PAYOUT, purely a "prestige" deal, and pretty much the only people that would be interested in a sport league in the first place are the people in the running to make this thing, and they bowl with people that most likely wouldn't want to do it.  If you're averaging 170 on a house shot, why would you want to bowl on sport patterns? 

I got them to start offering a PBA league over the summer for a couple years, but the turnout last summer was so bad that they aren't going to do it again. 

Gizmo,
     Based on Fish's reports, which you can take with a grain of salt, there are many good bowlers in this area. If there isn't a Sports league available, there are only 2 reasons why. 1) People are lazy. Either too lazy to organize it, the centers are too lazy to run the tapes, or the local association is too lazy to deal with the Sports memberships. Maybe a combination of all three. Or 2) The bowlers are too scared to give up their 300's and 240 averages to bowl on a challenging condition. Reason #2 stops a lot of places from having them. When I was in the Houston area, we didn't have any...but we lobbied the center and got one in the summer at least. It was always a popular league and used up all the lanes they had available for it, usually with a waiting list. It is still going as far as I know. But because of #1, we weren't a certified sport league, the center didn't want to run the tapes and deal with all the sport league paperwork. It was fine for the summer, but that won't really work in a Fall/Winter league. You would think people like Aleshire would be clamouring for a Sports shot/PBAX league, to get off the easy shots and bowl on tougher patterns. If not, look at reason #2.

That's because everyone wants to bowl on tough shots, until they actually bowl on tough shots. 

Bingo!

We have a PBA league in the summer here locally. The first year, full house(36 Lanes, 4 bowlers per pair) of bowlers to start, lost about 1/4 of them by season end. The next year, we filled about 20 lanes. The past couple of years, maybe 10 lanes.

Reality is an unforgiving mistress.