What can we say about the Collinsville Tournament?

Hmm...

Well, I guess there's no sugar coating this one. As a team, we just didn't bowl that well. We learned what we always seem to learn with this tournament which is that 2 weeks just doesn't seem like enough time to prepare the bowlers. As I stated in my previous post, many of the bowlers seemed to be pretty relaxed about summer practice and it just simply takes time to get your game back to where it was when we ended our season last year.

We made many silly mistakes. We missed a bunch of easy spares, spares that we normally don't miss. We let our bowling upset us and afffect the next ball, which upset us more which affected the next ball and the next thing we know is we have half the game gone already and we're still thinking about the bad shot we made in the first frame. The general attitude reminded me of a defeated team just going through the motions trying to get to the end.

There were several positives Saturday, first, a shout out to our JV team. Overall, I think they did a very good job. Secondly, with as badly as our Varsity team bowled, its only fair to mention that with the stats posted here, you will be able to see that all of our practicing on single pin spares, specifically the 10-pin and 7-pin, really paid off. Last year we averaged 68% on our single pin spares and, with one of the worst scoring tournaments I've witnessed, our single pin spare percentage was 72%!!! In fact, looking back through last years stats, I only found 4 other matches out of the 18 that I kept track of that our single pin spare precentage was higher than 72%.

I think we've found our silver lining!

Now that we have our first tournament jitters out of the way, we can focus on the upcoming tournaments and matches with the confidence of knowing our practice and hard work is paying off.