Bowling Ball Surface Prep for Tournaments

If you’re a tournament bowler, you’re used to traveling with what some bowlers call their “tournament bag:” a selection of balls designed to handle a variety of unknown sport conditions. Usually, these balls consist of a mix of different types of cores and coverstocks. That’s a great start, but where many bowlers tend to fall short is in their surface preparation.

What is surface preparation?

Surface preparation (or surface prep) is not to be confused with maintenance. Regularly cleaning your equipment, getting treatments to remove oil from the cover, and performing general resurfacings all improve the ball’s longevity and performance over the long term.

Surface prep is the fresh sanding you apply to a bowling ball to help it match current conditions or those you expect to face. Over the years, I’ve seen the vast majority of bowlers arrive at a tournament, take their first two balls out of the bag, and think that they’re ready. A small fraction of these bowlers might have prepped their surfaces the night before, but for many, surface prep falls somewhere after checking their slide and loosening up their shoulders in order of importance.

Before we dive into the how, let’s cover the why.

Why prepare your surface each time?

I’ve heard plenty of reasons why people aren’t preparing the surface of their ball before a tournament block:

• “I only threw this ball for a few shots last week; the surface is still pretty fresh.”
• “I like this ball a bit shiny, so I don’t want to sand it.”
• “I don’t know what’s out there, so why bother?”

Here’s why you should prep the surface every time: consistency.

When you’ve taken the time to sand each of your balls with a fresh surface before the block, you create consistent reads between each ball. Rather than having one ball that is fresh, one that is “pretty fresh,” and one that hasn’t seen a sanding pad in weeks or months, you’ll have ...