I edited the note about Matt O’Connor’s perfect game to properly reflect the league it was bowled in.  The slug for the post has also been edited.

I will be beginning to see a bowling coach a week from Thursday, but I’ve seen Ron Clifton’s site at Bowl4Fun.com recommended for bowling tips by a number of bowlers online.  Many of the tips he gives on the site are suitable for bowlers at every skill level, so I’ve added a link to the site to the sidebar.  I’ll ask my own coach if he recommends the site when I have my first session (or the next time I see him, whichever comes first).

One of my new friends from the BowlingFans.com group decided to start his own blog, also hosted on WordPress, so I’ve added that to the blogroll. I hope you’ll do the same with this blog, CG. 😀

Though neither tournament club currently operates in my area, I have plenty of memories bowling in the ABT (and even scoring for them @ my house) and NABI (the one time my late mother saw me bowl in a tournament was a NABI event), so I was torn about adding them to the blog’s sidebar.  I have caved in and done so, wanting a larger view than just my local scene in my links list, and I am adding them with the hope that they eventually come back to New England.

A couple of important sites were added to the sidebar list today…

First, I put up a link to the USBC Open’s page, which is bowling’s national championship tournament.  It will provide daily updates when the tournament is in progress (as it is now).  If you’re interested in the USBC Women’s Championships, you can find a link to that tournament there.

The other site I added today is the Kegel Bowling site.  Of interest here is their online oil pattern library; if you know the lanes you’re bowling on, as well as the lane machine and lane conditioner being used, you can get a list of all of the oil patterns available at your bowling center.  While this may not be of interest to the beginning bowler, it is definitely of interest to the more advanced bowler.

BowlingBallReviews.com has been added to the sidebar.  As its name implies, the site gives ratings and reviews of bowling balls from the most important people of all…the bowlers who use them.  This one is worthy of being bookmarked.

Thanks to “Dennis Michael” from the BowlingCommunity.com forums for pointing me to this site. 😀

As it is one of the largest and best-known of the private amateur tournaments, I have added the link to the Hoinke Classic’s site to the sidebar list. It generally runs from February to November of every year in Cincinnati, and features singles, doubles, and team events (as well as an all-events competition) for men & women (including mixed doubles and teams) in both handicap and scratch divisions.

Figuring there’s “room for growth”, I have reorganized the blog to make it easier for readers to find the topics that interest them. I have added a few new categories, and I’ll summarize what’s in each category (including the old ones) as follows:

Administravia: Posts about the blog itself, including new links, edits to old posts, and errata.
Cross-training: For posts about athletes in other sports doing bowling-related things.
Equipment: Posts where I bring up equipment will be filed here.
General: General topics, including stuff away from bowling and open bowling activity I don’t consider practice.
Leagues: Posts about my league-related activity. Honor scores that I post about that took place in a league will be filed here, as well.
Practice: Practice summaries.
Tournaments: Tournament news, mainly the tournaments in my area.

As I said, this system should make it easier for readers to find what they want to look at. Enjoy it. 🙂

After some controversy about foul language being used in initial episodes, a new bowling podcast, “On Strike,” has its first official episode up.  The link to the podcast site has been added to the sidebar list.  Subscriptions through iTunes, Google, Yahoo!, and RSS are available on the podcast site.

Found a number of sites in the last few days, so I added them all in one shot, and posting about them here…

First, I found Sean Rash’s blog, “Rash’s Rants”, on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s site today. Sean Rash is a PBA Tour exempt player, and winner of the 2007 USBC Masters. He blogs his views about life on tour, so his blog’s been added to the blogroll.

The next couple of sites aren’t really new to me, but I’ve become more involved with them recently. BowlingFans.com describes itself as “a site for bowling fans by bowling fans” and features an array of bowling articles and tips for bowlers at every level. They have an associated forum at BowlingCommunity.com, and I have registered there and posted an introduction. I’ve received several welcome replies, so their billing as “the friendliest bowling forums in the world” is true. Both sites have been listed in the sidebar.

I am an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) veteran, usually hanging out on EFnet and Undernet, but I have been very disappointed in #bowling on EFnet, as the times I’ve been in that channel, no one was really talking (5 users, all ops, and no way to really tell how many of those users are the channel bots). I have, however, found #BowlingFans (yes, related to the above site) on a small network called WyldRyde. I have added a link to the Flash client on BowlingFans.com to the sidebar, however, if you prefer a standalone IRC client (I heartily recommend mIRC for Windows users), instructions on how to log in using those can be found once you log into the Flash client. I could add an IRC link (beginning with irc://), but would rather thank BowlingFans.com by directing everyone to the Flash client initially. Hope to chat with everyone there. 😀

The hits just keep on coming…hehehehe!

I stumbled on the above site while checking the TPT site for news about yesterday’s tournament.  It’s the homepage of a logging application for Windows which will generate not only score-based statistics, but also such things as spare percentages.  I’ve been keeping a practice score log on an Excel (actually OpenOffice.org) spreadsheet (used to calculate the averages in my practice summaries), but this program will give more detailed reports, and you can even get reports based on type of event (some tournaments are now requiring you to provide past tournament scores).   The link has been added to the sidebar list.

The blog titled above has been added to the blogroll. The author of this blog is unknown, but it appears to be used to give information and advice to the person just getting into the game. If you’ve been thinking of taking up the game seriously and don’t know how to start, this would be worth a look. 😀

Note: The blog mentions the American Bowling Congress, which has been folded into the USBC.

I’ve given the blog a once-over, checking to see that all of the web pages linked in this blog have the “blank target” set and edited the entries that needed them.  I also recently removed my homepage link from the “About” page for security-related reasons (read:  possible harvester bots).

I’ve added the “Striking Difference Experience” and “Bowling Balls and Info” blogs to the sidebar, becoming the first blogs to be included in this blog’s proper blogroll. “Striking Difference Experience” is the blog of Brian Chilcutt, a USBC Gold coach based out of Illinois, while “Bowling Balls and Info” appears to be focused on bowling news, especially in the area of bowling equipment. Great to have you two aboard! 😀

I’m not what you call a “domain name snob,” but I felt I wanted a couple for this blog, so I had tenthboard.net and 10thboard.net registered and mapped to the blog. tenthboard.net will be the primary URL (as I have the ordinal spelled out on my header graphic), but 10thboard.net will redirect to tenthboard.net, as will the old 10thboard.wordpress.com URL. Either three will work, but those of you who are subscribed to this blog’s RSS feed may want to update your subscriptions to reflect the new URL.  Both domains were functioning properly when I checked, but it may take some time for the domain names to propagate through the DNS system, so if the new names don’t work, give it time. 😀

I made some changes to earlier posts, including noting the full names of the pro shop people in their first mention in this blog, and linking the Northeast Amateur Tournament’s site to my mention of them in the “Tournament scene” note in the post about my new ball. As the NAT site is now known, I have also included the link in the sidebar list.

I forgot that I may be entering “Virtual Tournaments” on occasion once I return to league bowling and establish an average, so the link to VirtualTournaments.com has been added to the sidebar list.

I also edited various earlier entries to include full names of various people mentioned in this blog that I come into contact with at the lanes, including my cousin and his wife, who I still intend to bowl with in the future. The exceptions to these edits are the pro shop people (who are only mentioned by first name for now), and my brother and sister, my best friend Ed, his wife, and her sister (in order to protect their privacy).

I’ve added some bowling links that I may or may not visit fairly frequently to the blog’s sidebar. All of them are on the bowling page of my site, but are included here for easy reference. The obvious national sites are there (including the USBC and the PBA), but as I want to reference local bowling happenings fairly often, some of them are more local in nature.

EDIT:  Made a slight tweak to the link listings when I noticed you can set the “_blank” target.  After doing so, links will now open in a new window (or a tab if your browser supports them and you have new windows set to open in tabs in your browser options).

I would like to thank BowlingZone.com for adding this blog to the “Bowling Blogs” section of the site. 🙂

As you can see, there is now a header graphic for the blog, done by my friend tzn from #RedSox on EFnet IRC. Thanks man!

In other administravia, I added links to Westgate Lanes and the $55 pair of Etonic Strike shoes to the previous post, and updated the “About” page to include a link to my homepage.