First night: some high averages, some high handicaps.....

Last night was our first night of bowling. A couple of tidbits from the meeting:

• Handicap is now 90% of the diff between your average and 200 (last season it was 210)
• Pre-bowling is allowed; anytime Wed-Tuesday before the scheduled night you can go and pre-bowl. (We’ll still have to pay for you the normal night, as an FYI, so you don't pay when you pre-bowl) 
• If you can’t make it, you can either find a sub or pay for you to “absentee bowl”. This isn’t preferred, since its 10 pins below your average, pre-bowling or finding a sub is better, but worst case, its an option. 
• You have to bowl 6 nights to bowl in the playoffs and you can't pre-bowl then

I don’t know if we won last night- handicaps aren’t figured out yet and we all decided to just let the center figure out handicaps, which will determine who won and who didn’t - I’ll know next week. Scratch, we won one game. (scratch is our actual “raw” score) but that doesn't mean we won that game for sure, although its likely we won at least one game.

I played with new ball /fingertip grip and am currently either knocking down strikes or just missing picking up spares. Which, if I knock em all down is no biggie, but if I have a night I’m off it isn’t great-but I’m getting better at it and picked up a couple spares last night. Luckily my average isn’t going to be too hard to keep up with, although its higher than I really wanted: 122. Gus, on the other hand, found his game is apparently going to be our 200+ bowler, as his average is around 207!! (lets hope he keeps it up!!) Abe did well; tried some things out and what not, ended up with a nice 150-160 average and Thaddius, well…… he’s going to have a nice hefty handicap and can only go up from there. All in all, (except Thaddius) we all bowled better than we really “wanted” to, considering the first night is the night to establish averages and thus you really want to try some new stuff out, change it up, etc, so you aren’t killing yourself to beat your average for the rest of the season. We joked that the pins were lighter and the wind was blowing them down.

Anyway, next week its Ethel, Esme, Dexter, and our newest team member, Maude! (welcome!) Everyone is entered in the computer except Maude because I didn’t know your last name, sorry….but you guys can ask someone to help you enter her in, no biggie. Of course, everyone will need to establish their averages again, so you probably won’t know if you won either; depends on if you play an uber competitive team or not and if they care to figure it out.

Good luck and good bowling!!