Congratulations Smash.
I took the class two years ago and had Suzie Minchew as the instructor in Vegas. The class was a lot of fun and Suzie is a great teacher.
I heard they are teaching more bowling techniques now and going into more detail on the technical aspect of the game since Bob Maki took over and incorporated Ritger's school into USA bowling as well. Can you give a summery of the class and what you learned.
I am just curious to see if it would be worth retaking it.
I have been studying under Dr. Jeff and Ron Clifton since I have taken the Silver class. Having been working with them for the past two years I realize how little about reading lanes, ball reaction and advanced fundamentals they were teaching at USAB. After a year, USAB offered Fred Bordine's Advanced Adjustments package that seemed to pick up much of what was left out of the Silver class that I took and much of what Dr. Jeff and Ron had been teaching me.
The Silver class I took was mostly based on advanced Coaching techniques and not advanced Bowling techniques. Not that I am putting the class I took down, because I'm not, I just wish they went as deep into bowling as coaching.
To explain the difference you can go through all of the classes I went through and still not know how to bowl, but you will probably be a half decent coach, once you figured out what you were doing.
To try to prove a point I have given coaching advice to a friend of mine who coaches youth Hockey and the advice worked, I know nothing about Hockey, but I know about coaching.
I think the origional thought at USAB, was that mostly advanced bowlers would be taking these classes and would already know all they would need to know about how to bowl, but would need to learn how to pass along this information.
Most of the people I attended the Silver with were parents of youth bowlers who were there to help out their kid's youth leagues by picking up more knowledge to pass on to the league as I was. Most of them couldn't bowl, or knew very little about the sport of bowling. After taking the class some of them thought they knew all there was to know about the game, until I pointed out what they didn't cover and there must be more to learn since there was the Gold level above us.
