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.
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.
So I assume you still play tic tac toe on a regular basis? I'm not going to deny that your points all have very applicable validity. But it's a lot easier to hit a 6 board area than to hit a 2 board area. Games that lack challenge or fail to constantly challenge people won't get very far. I've averaged within 2 or 3 pins for the last 5 or 6 years now even though I've physically gotten better and have gotten much smarter. However, on a house shot there's a cap, and when you get a bunch of guys together that average 220+ it's really a crapshoot as to who is gonna win. At the same time, my average and performance on sport conditions has continued to go up. Why is that? If I'm getting better and more accurate, why doesn't my house shot average continue to go up? You may have guys that can hit a 2 board area every time, but if you add some guys in that can hit 3-4 boards out of a 6 board area, they're equal. If you added 6 inches to the diameter of a basketball goal, Shaq's free throw percentage would go up pretty significantly, but you can't then compare him to Reggie Miller, even if the numbers are closer. The better bowler wins significantly fewer times on a house shot than they would on a tougher shot. Just because you haven't been around people or known people that made a decision on bowling based on the scoring pace doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I don't want to name drop or add names to this conversation that don't want to be a part of it, but I know several professionally successful people who don't bowl anymore specifically because of the scoring pace. If it's on a house shot or or involves handicap, they won't bowl, so by default, they just don't bowl much anymore. Have several collegiate friends that don't bowl leagues during the season, but they'll come bowl our PBA Exp league in the summer.
You also can't tell me that if the PGA made the cups bigger, made fairways wider, made courses shorter, and we started seeing sub 60 rounds out of the pros consistently that golf wouldn't fall off the face of the earth. Golf is respected and popular because of the challenge it offers. Bowling offers no such challenge. And I don't want to hear "well bowling is still challenging to a lot of people." So is golf, but it's the degree of challenge. The further above 200 you get, the more your score depends on carry, and when hitting the pocket isn't a challenge, winning or losing on a high scoring condition is based almost entirely on carry. A stone 8 here, and a ring 10 here is the difference between 300 and 258. A stone 8 and a ring ten in the middle of a dutch 200 is the difference between 200 and 198. Economics have driven people away from bowling, yes, but they are CHOOSING other activities OVER bowling because bowling doesn't offer the challenge, nor the rewards that other sports/games do. Bowling wasn't ever as lucrative as other sports, but when titles were worth 25k in the late 80's, that was a hell of a lot of money back then.
You can't tell me that a game without any appreciable difficulty will sustain participation, and the numbers support that. The membership decline corresponds directly with the increase in averages and honor scores. Other economical factors DO contribute, BUT if you'll look at the numbers, the decline and change happened a significant amount of time before the economy had anything to do with it. This was pre 9-11, gas was still under 1.50, people had jobs. Other sports continue to rise despite the economy, so you can't use the argument that the economy alone despite every other factor is to blame, because if it was, it would have the same effect across the board. I've got a lot of time in this, I have a lot of experience in this, and have several very big names in the industry that share the same opinions and read the information the same way I read it. Lack of challenge, lack of information, lack of coaching, and lack of integrity has run this sport into the ground, case closed.
