Chatting online with “CoachJim” this morning, I noted to him that I had been inconsistent in towel drills after doing them three times. As he later told me you get benefit from doing towel drills almost immediately, we began to suspect something more was behind me dropping the ball, and the coach suggested maybe making an adjustment to my ball. I did feel like my thumb was coming out a bit too early, so the suggestion was made to take some reverse pitch out of the thumb (pitches refer to the angles at which holes are drilled into balls), which would help the thumb stay in the ball a bit longer. As I didn’t know my ball’s drilling pattern offhand, I had to obtain it from the pro shop later. I’ll post the “before” pattern here:
Span: 4 7/16″ X 4 1/2″*
Thumb: 29/32″ hole, 1/8″ reverse pitch, 1/4″ left pitch
Middle finger: 23/32″ grip, 1/8″ forward pitch
Ring finger: 21/32″ grip, 3/16″ forward pitch
I went to the lanes later in the afternoon to have the ball worked on. I was hoping Ray would be on duty, but instead got another employee, Jon Corda. After talking with him, we decided to go with changing the pitch in the thumb to 0″ forward/reverse. As I noted to him that I had discomfort in part of my thumb, we also went with reducing the left pitch to 1/8″. The change would be made by inserting a slug in the thumb hole and redrilling and sanding. The procedure took about 15 minutes, and by the time we were done, I noticed that the thumb came out of the ball well when relaxed.
The true test, of course, would be bowling a game after making the adjustment, so I had Tim Major turn on a lane and paid for a game (and found out that I now qualified for the $1/game league bowler discount). The ball definitely felt better coming off my hand during the game, and I was able to have the thumb come out a bit later. The upshot was that I had a 201 in my trial game, with the only blemish being missing the 1-2-4 in the 7th frame, which I made up for by striking out in the 10th frame (I had a double in the 2nd and 3rd frames, which would’ve almost guaranteed a 200 game if I stayed clean.). I am happy with my grip now, and will have a plastic spare ball drilled the same way next week.
It is now one week until my return to competitive bowling! 😀
*Span is the measurement of the distances between the thumb and finger holes and is usually given as thumb-to-middle-finger by thumb-to-ring-finger.
The Tenth Board 