Conducting A Year-End Review

As the bowling season ends, many bowlers look forward to some time away from the lanes, some participate in another activity or sport, and some continue to bowl all year long. Whatever the case, bowlers should take some time to reflect on their league bowling season. This is a much different process compared to reviewing a single tournament, simply due to the number of games and the length of the season. Does anyone remember what happened in week four of the year? Probably not.

This is where bowlers need to use the resources at their disposal to look beyond the year-end average and whether or not it was above or below whatever goal was set. Many leagues provide printouts with all of the individual weekly totals and games, providing a detailed view of the results throughout the year.

On an even more detailed level, bowlers who track their games in an app can examine the minutiae of their weekly performances that resulted in those scores. Beyond that, bowlers who have taken notes throughout the season will have access to even more information to review. Put together, all this information can help bowlers evaluate their year objectively and set their sights on what to work on before the next season begins.

For the purpose of this article, I’ll be using my own season to provide examples of the kinds of insights to be gleaned from all of this information, thanks to the statistics and weekly blog posts that serve as journal entries to review my year.

Analyzing your scores

The most basic way to review your yearly performance is to look at your average to see if you met your goal. It would be easy to say that it was a successful year if you did, but could it have been even better? And, of course, if you didn’t reach your goal, where can you look to find some clues showing where things went wrong?

Mid-year and final average

Taking a look at how your average changed over the course of the year can help determine which part of the year was your strongest. I don’t recommend necessarily looking month-to-month, because there is bound to be normal variance over a small sample size. By looking at larger chunks, you get a truer idea of how different periods of the year stack up.

In my case, I averaged 229.2 in the first half of the year and 227.3 in the second half. This amounts to less than a one percent difference between the two halves. While most bowlers would prefer to see the higher number in the second half, it’s really not significant. When looking at these numbers, a minimum of two to three percent difference between the mid-year benchmark and final average would indicate an issue, particularly if there is a drop.

For a small climb in average, it could be as simple as the bowler’s game improving over time due to the work being put in, or simply not practicing in the off-season and starting with some rust the first few weeks. On the other hand, a small drop in average might imply a fatigue issue, with the grind of the season wearing the bowler down. Again, this is pretty general information that really only gives a small indication of how the season went.

Game-by-game average

This one is very interesting, and it can really be a good indicator of the parts of your game that might need improvement. Even without any other information, we know some things about transition that would allow us to infer key information from our first, second, and third game scores.

Game one is when the lanes are freshest. This tends to benefit bowlers with higher speed and more forward roll. Having a lower average in this game could imply that your ball roll is too sharp and responsive to the fresh back ends. It could also mean that you’re a “slow starter” and need to work on a better warm-up routine to get physically and mentally ready to compete from the first frame.

Game two is the transition game. The lanes break down throughout each league session, but struggling in this game implies that you might be missing clues in the first game, or that you are taking a bit too long to make moves. For higher average bowlers who require a lot of strikes, the second game often has more indicators of transition, which results in fewer strikes and makes it harder to maintain average.

Game three is when the lanes are most burned up, which tends to benefit bowlers with higher degrees of axis rotation and tilt. Struggling in this game generally indicates a need to improve this part of your game, including expanding your comfort zone to potentially move farther inside and use steeper launch angles.

I averaged 223, 229, and 231 in games one, two, and three, respectively. Game one definitely appears to be an issue. If you’ll remember from my mid-year review blog, I missed a higher proportion of spares in the first game of the night, so that could account for the small difference in that game. I also remember a few weeks talking about coming out “flat” and not on my game right away. On the other hand, my overall consistency in games two and three are a good indicator of my adjustments throughout the night.

Average and consistency

Many bowlers have a skewed view of what it means to be consistent. Without doing a large-scale statistical analysis, you can’t really be sure of what “normal” variation is in a bowling average or how your variation would compare to it, but let’s use me as an example to discuss “consistency.”

With a finishing average of 228, my expected series score on any given night would be 684. Over the course of the season, I had exactly two triples in the 680s (682 and 687). I only had eight triples within 30 pins of my average, including those two. That’s quite a bit of variance for a higher-average bowler, who most would generally consider as being more “consistent” than a lower-average bowler. Here’s a visual showing all of the variation in my scores from one week to the next.

Am I a prime example of consistency? Probably not. Am I an outlier? Also probably not. When looking at your “consistency,” it’s probably more important to assess the game-by-game average consistency than to place much value on having all your series scores within a certain range. The obvious goal after looking at this would be to maximize the scores of nights where I’m clearly not striking as much so that I can get closer to my average, to create fewer and shallower dips in the graph.

Looking deeper into the stats

For bowlers who track their frames using an app like PinPal, you have access to even more information that can help you evaluate your year. It can be a bit overwhelming, but two of the best pieces of data are your strike and first ball percentages and, of course, your spare shooting information.

Performance benchmarks

A while ago, I wrote a Breaking Down Barriers series for bowlers trying to get past the 180, 200, and 220 plateaus, and I included some performance benchmarks for each of them. I’ve included them below, along with my own performance measures from this year.

By themselves, these performance measures don’t really tell you too much. They give you a general idea of how you compare to bowlers at certain average benchmarks, but there are a lot of variables to consider. Strike percentage is affected by tactical choices, physical game consistency, and the mental game, so there are a lot of ingredients. This is why journaling and having notes about your adjustments is a key part of reviewing your season, because it provides more clarity.

In my case, we can see that my single-pin and clean frame percentage is actually lower than the benchmarks for a 220 average, despite averaging 228. This goes to show the importance of strike percentage at this level, because a 4 percent increase more than made up for those deficiencies in my game. It’s also important to note that my performance metrics are also pretty normal for a house shot bowler. The benchmarks in the table are calculated using performance metrics on both sport and house shot conditions. On average, the performance measures on a house shot typically include a higher strike percentage and lower spare percentage compared to the same scoring level on sport shots, which aligns with my own stats.

Looking deeper at spare shooting

Spare shooting also has multiple components, but they are easier to examine when you have an app where you’ve tracked all your scores. You can examine which spares you missed most to figure out what needs to be done to improve. For example, which single pins give you the most trouble? Which multi-pin leaves do you miss more often? If your misses are evenly spread out, this would tend to imply a physical execution or focus issue, but if there are specific spares that are notably worse than others, then it’s more likely related to strategy or confidence issues.

Examining your spares can also give you clues about your game by letting you know what you leave the most. For example, a righthander likely leaves 10 pins more than any other spare, but these can come in different forms. If you see a lot of 4 pins and 9 pins along with those 10 pins, it’s more likely that they are ringing 10 pins, because the 4 pins and 9 pins indicate too much angle at the pins, which tends to also cause ringing 10s. If you see a lot of 7 pins or 2 pins along with the 10 pins, there’s a higher likelihood that the 10 pins were weaker, flatter hits. Either case can tell you something about your lane play decisions and which direction you might need to go in terms of your desired ball reaction.

What about the spare ball?

In terms of my own review, one of the interesting comparisons that I have the ability to do this year is examining my effectiveness with and without a spare ball. It’s a smaller sample size, with only about six weeks using a spare ball, but because nothing else changed in terms of the bowler, skill set, or practice, it’s worth noting the differences.

The slightly higher efficiency across the board provides some validation for making this change late in the season, and it reinforces the idea of using a spare ball to keep things a bit easier when it comes to spare shooting, even for someone capable of throwing a reactive ball dead straight.

The value of journaling

Finally, a year-end review would not be complete without reviewing your notes from the year. Just like tracking your stats, this obviously requires work throughout the season. I highly encourage bowlers to get into the habit of taking notes after each league session. It can be as simple as your list of adjustments and your scores, or it can be a detailed journal entry that shares your mindset before you started, rates your mental game, and notes all the positives and negatives of the night.

The value of these weekly journals is not always immediately evident, although there are examples from this year’s blogs where I applied some lessons almost immediately. Having a journal of your season’s performances will help you identify some common themes or issues you faced, examine your thought processes and mental game elements, and keep track of the adjustments that worked or didn’t work so you can figure out why.

Were there consistent themes?

Much like your scoring trends, your journals can help you identify or explain consistent themes in your game. For example, my blogs identified several nights of starting the league session “flat,” without the desired level of energy or focus. This points to a need for a better pre-competition routine to get me into the right state of arousal before practice starts, and this is something I can try to develop and perfect for the next season.

Identifying mental game lapses or strengths

Another key piece of the puzzle that you can examine through journaling is your mental game. Did you often get distracted or struggle under pressure? Taking away the emotional response to these situations, was there an underlying cause for these failures? With a detailed journal, and by reviewing these instances at the end of the year, you can seek out help where needed, find some online resources, or tweak your existing mental toolkit.

On the other hand, were there moments of pride where you came through in the clutch or stayed calm when facing adversity? These can be confidence builders for the future. Without a written account, bowlers will tend to focus on and remember the failures rather than reinforcing positive beliefs. Reviewing journal entries of clutch performances can help change the story you tell yourself and build a more confident “you” for the next season or future tournaments.

Tracking your adjustments

Even the most basic notes should include the adjustments you used and how well they worked. Primarily, this can be used to build your experiential knowledge and database of potential adjustments for the future. These notes form the foundation of what your mind will compare when deciding on a future adjustment, and writing them down will help engrave them in your memory.

Second, reviewing the moves that didn’t work as well will allow you to evaluate why. Were they the wrong moves? Did you lack confidence in the move and therefore didn’t execute properly? These are the two most common reasons an adjustment doesn’t work. The first is tactical and forms part of your knowledge base. But if an adjustment failed because of a lack of confidence and/or ability to execute the adjustment, then it provides feedback for something to improve in your game.

For example, several times over the season, I struggled to slow down and hook the ball more. Given that I’d revamped my game over the past couple of years to play straighter, this shouldn’t be a surprise, but I found myself struggling mentally when I couldn’t just go back to throwing it slower at will. Clearly, it’s a part of my game I now need to work on again so that I can do it when needed.

Conclusion

I strongly encourage competitive bowlers to conduct a post-competition review after every tournament. This takes a different form from an end-of-season review of your league bowling because of how much time is involved. Every bowler should do this as well. Because we can’t rely on our memory for every week of bowling, bowlers can and should track their scores and journal their performances over the season. This will give you the best information possible to help establish what really happened during the season and how to go about improving for next year.