I'm putting the finishing touches on my seminar, and it's been created based on my experience with what causes the biggest problems for bowlers and pro shops alike when it comes to interacting with each other.  However, I do want to put more emphasis on the bigger problems, and make absolutely for certain that they are resolved within the seminar. 

So when it comes to making a ball choice or interacting with your pro shop, what is the hardest or most confusing part of it?  Understanding the numbers, like rg and diff?  Understanding layouts?  Surfaces?  Proper fitting?  How to make sure your pro shop knows what they're doing?  I'll be making and uploading videos section by section, and hope to make it into a presentation I can at least locally present at centers. 

There's such a rift between bowlers and pro shops right now, and it's creating some rather drastic problems.  Things in the industry have changed so much, and there's a lot that has done a 180, fitting or drilling techniques that were "right" 20 years ago no longer apply and are in fact wrong.  Some bowlers don't understand this and think the pro shop guys don't know what they're doing, and vice versa.  A lot of camps and seminars focus on what to do once you actually get on the lanes, but I haven't seen one yet that goes into much detail about the stuff off the lanes. 

The point of this is to help people educate themselves enough to know when they should and shouldn't argue with their pro shop over something, or to give them enough information to be able to protect themselves from "bad" pro shops, and at the same time explain to them why we do some of the things we do.  Basically help the bowler and pro shop help each other or get them on the same page. 

You are the proshop and supposedly the professional.

It is your job to ask the right questions to find out how much knowledge the bowler has, what they are expecting out of a ball, what their problem areas are, and adjust to those answers and give them what they are expecting.

Bowlers who know what they want generally express that pretty quickly and you do what they want. If you feel it is wrong for what they are trying to do, explain so in diplomatic way one time but if they insist then do it their way.

I know over half our customer base relied on us to steer them in the right direction for ball choice, drillings, etc.

Many would simply say they like to stand on dot x throw over the 2nd arrow and the ball hook enough to get to the pocket. I called it blackjack bowling, stand on 21, hit 10.

If the ball they wanted was way off then you do your best to explain to them why that is so. If they won't budge then you do your best to make that ball work on their condition.

Yes, and we do all that, but sometimes when we need to explain things or when they want to delve further into something, we don't have the time or they don't have the time to get into it.  Just like coaching is for outside of league because league isn't the environment where you're going to learn, the pro shop is for business, and not the greatest environment to sit down with someone for a couple hours and go over things.  Yes, you always have to discuss certain things to get the right service for the right bowler, but if they come in and say, "I'm having trouble getting out of the ball, can you plug and redrill my thumbhole and add reverse pitch," and you inspect their fit and find that reverse wouldn't solve their problem, that it's a different issue, you can tell them that, and they can make their decision, but if they want to understand fitting overall and the fitting process, we often don't have the time to go over it all.  So it either occurs outside of working hours, or when we happen to have some down time.  By putting together a seminar, we can have time set aside to teach people all kinds of things, taking time, using tools, illustrations, to really help people understand so that they can ask more informed questions, so they can understand why we do things the way they do, and to foster better communication between us and them by getting the customer up to speed on some basics that will really help them out. 

What you described is the usual process.  And yes, it has to work like that more often than not.  But I've seen the demand for this type of thing, just like people ask for coaching, they also ask for information.  Instead of a coaching clinic, this is basically an equipment clinic.  Just like not everybody who has problems will accept coaching, not everyone who doesn't understand equipment will come to the clinic.  As I've said before, this isn't a fix all for the entire bowling community.  It's for those who don't understand who want to understand.