Yahoo news comment section? Seriously?
It's well known to be full of nothing but negative trolls and idiots. This is not the gauge of anyone that you should be holding up as an example of anything.
Bowling is not broken because people are scoring high. I don't know how you keep arriving at this conclusion, but it's patently absurd. I don't know a single soul who decided to bowl or decided against it based on the "ease of scoring too high".
The problem with bowling is that leagues are down because people are busy, broke, and the sport is viewed more in the cultural lexicon as an anachronistic recreation more than a sport....and this means new lanes aren't being built for serious competition, rather they are being built as family fun centers or night clubs.
Score is not the issue, never was...any more than people scoring better in the 1970's was a detriment compared to the 1940's or 1950's.
So you have several years of industry experience, seeing the numbers, hearing from industry vets, and people very heavily involved in the sport at a professional level to base this opinion on I'm assuming? "I don't know how you keep arriving at this conclusion." You think this is some idea or opinion that randomly popped into my head one day that I'm trying to make into my own personal crusade? Everybody wants to tell me about the CURRENT state of bowling, yes, DUH, I get how it currently is, I WORK IN THE INDUSTRY. But what everybody keeps skipping over is how it got there in the first place.
I'm not saying it's the ONLY reason, but it's THE reason that bowling has shifted from competitive to casual, and when a sport shifts down to casual, you don't have the same die hards keeping the sport alive. People won't bowl scratch leagues, because "the scores are too high." Scratch bowlers won't touch anything that has anything to do with handicap, because of all the sandbaggers. I had a team that almost got kicked out of a handicap league because we were accused of "loading up a team" to win the league. Win the league we did, and in impressive fashion. Know what our prize winnings were? 190 bucks a person. Just screams loading up a team to bowl 35 weeks to make less than 200 bucks, doesn't it? Got a buddy that's 35, averages 235, and he quit bowling last year because it all boiled down to carry. If he carries, he shoots 750+, if he doesn't, he shoots 680. Said he was sick of being disappointed every time he lost a shot at a big game or big set. If you don't shoot 300 or 800 anymore, it doesn't matter. Leagues are small, and people balk at increasing league fees to beef up the prize fund, so there's no reason to be competitive. The handicap bowlers don't practice, they just whine for more handicap so they don't HAVE to improve, and the scratch bowlers don't practice because you can't practice carry. In ADDITION to bowling several leagues a week, people also spent time practicing, because bowling used to be about how you threw the ball and where you threw it. Now you just have to hook it a bunch and throw it hard and keep it right of the headpin, and you'll have a good shot at some big games. Even SCRATCH leagues on house shots aren't that competitive anymore. People spend more time joking about, "just throw it anywhere," than they do congratulating people for good shots. Everybody knows it's a crap shoot and a carry contest, so it's hard to get into it when you know the outcome of the game is dependent on who leaves the 9 pin, or who carries the 10, instead of who is making the shots.
Bowling has been made into a constant quest for the big numbers, or just an inside activity during the winter to keep you occupied while you drink. The true competition for the scratch bowlers doesn't exist anymore, the lower average bowlers can't keep up, so they get discouraged and quit, and you can't count on the casual bowlers for any kind of consistency. I GUARANTEE if you return the integrity to bowling that the sport picks up again. How else do you explain the continuing decline of USBC membership as a whole, but the increase of interest and participation in sport bowling, especially by the youths, a group you'd never think would embrace extra challenge or work? Rick Benoit has recently put some finishing touches on his BowlU endeavor, which should finally start getting bowling going in the right direction again. Mark my words, as the current generation bowler gets older and/or quits, the youth who are participating in high integrity bowling will push for a return to how bowling used to be, or at the very least to adjust it for modern times, and bowling will go back up when the scoring pace goes down.
Things that are going good will survive ANY economical problems. The NFL and PGA don't seem to know we had a recession, so why is that an acceptable excuse for bowling? Amateur participation rates have ZERO to do with a professional sport's success. I've never played a game of tackle football in my life, but I'll watch it every Sunday. Bowling takes all my golf money, so I don't golf much, but I still watch a lot on tv. Several things may have contributed to bringing bowling down, but it only takes one domino falling to knock the rest of them down.
