Coaches’ Corner: The Ball Start

Welcome to the second edition of BTM’s Coaches’ Corner series. In these articles, the focus is on helping coaches improve their skills and approach to coaching, while also providing information that bowlers can apply to their own games. Our last article addressed getting started in the world of coaching. This month, we’ll take a deep dive into one of the most important parts of the approach: the ball start.

To be clear, the ball start phase of the approach isn’t just about the ball. It’s also about footwork direction, step distance, and synchronization of the feet with the ball’s movement. For this reason, I include the first step of a five-step approach as part of the “ball start phase,” even though the ball actually starts moving in the second step.

In this article, we’ll look at tips and tricks to improve this area and discuss why it’s so important.

The importance of the ball start

The ball start phase of the approach is one of the most important pieces of the bowling game. It sets the stage for the rest of the approach and influences the amount of muscle tension and compensation you are likely to see. It’s for this reason that coaches should work on this area with their bowlers, even as they progress to a more advanced level.

More specifically, the ball start directly affects each of the following:

• Swing direction
• Timing
• Footwork direction
• Swing looseness

Indirectly, the ball start can affect body position, release timing, and hand position going into the release. Luckily, the ball start phase is also very easy to isolate for training, making it an ideal area of focus for everyone from beginners to advanced players.

Before going into the details of the ball start drill and key modifications that you can use to improve your coaching, let’s first discuss some of the key points of the ball start.

The “ideal” ball start

I’ve put “ideal” in quotation marks here because there’s no perfect way to do this for every bowler. The exact timing and shape of the ball start will depend on the bowler’s overall swing and game, as well as their body type, arm length, ...