The Evil Drift

Drift is a very important and often misused word in bowling. We talk about it being too much or too little – we shouldn’t do it – no, it’s really okay if you only do it two boards – no, that’s not right – it doesn’t matter how much you drift only that you do it in the same direction the same amount every time – whew! You can see there are a lot of ideas about drift. Here’s mine: drift is ending up more left or right than your “normal”. If you usually drift two left and on this shot you ended up four left, you drifted two.

It’s difficult to execute consistently when you walk a different path than you intend to throw. You’ll likely slide right or left of where you started, depending on which type of shot you’re throwing. That means you will not always end up at the foul line on the board on which you started. Good! You shouldn’t. (Such blasphemy!) By the way, this walk-the-same-path-you-throw stuff doesn’t apply to power players. That’s another article for later.

Up, down, away

I understand there are some different terminologies across the country for what I am about to discuss. For the purposes of this article, here ...