Sport Condition Pocket % (Sport)
Standard Deviation (Pocket)
Standard Deviation (All) Total Area (Boards)
just as good as the other styles. Despite the minor differences, no one
style had a tremendous advantage over the other on either lane condition. That might simply be reality, but it could also mean the bowling styles weren’t defined well enough for any one or more style to have an appreciable difference in performance. “If I had to use the terms
cranker, stroker and tweener to define a bowling style,” says Padilla, “I would only do so in terms of the ball’s motion on the lanes — like the USBC testers did. A cranker has higher revs, higher speed and covers more area. That only applies to the ball on the lane. But when you look at what the bowler is doing physically to achieve those results, there are not a lot of consistencies. “There are only some
tendencies, such as having a stronger wrist position at the bottom of the swing. But one cranker might have slower footwork and another has faster footwork. It doesn’t jibe.” Padilla explains that it’s
what the body is doing during a shot that’s key, specifically how each component of the body is working in relation to every other component. When you think of a shot
the way Padilla and his com- patriots at USBC Coaching do, you don’t see a bowler who is a stroker, for example. Instead, you would see that bowler’s starting position as a one component of his shot, that bowler’s, pushaway, his footwork, tempo, timing, arm swing, wrist position, release, slide, follow through and more. And you would be analyzing every one of
Stroker 50% 0.69
1.45 1.30
those components in relation to how they are working with every other one of those components. “Effectively, we’re looking at an infinite
number of bowling styles,” says Padilla. “If there are 100 variations for each of those
Tweener 55% 0.48
1.59 1.08
Cranker 60% 0.49
1.47 1.18
components, then there are any imagin- able number of combinations to all those components. There are so many pieces and we can break them down even further. Arm swing, for example… you can break that down to speed, angle, power, whatever. But when we identify those pieces, then we’re able to learn something about them and pass that along to other players and coaches. “Our job is to identify what
works best for each individual — taking into account dif- ferent body shapes, strengths, comfort levels and abilities.” It’s pretty much every bowl-
er’s goal to throw more strikes, and if Padilla and the rest of USBC Coaching have it their way, they’ll be able to define all the pieces that go into making those strikes happen. “It does take some of the
fun out of bowling, getting rid of those colorful terms,” says Padilla. But we have the ability to describe bowling scientifically. If there’s a player who exhibits X, Y and Z, we can work with that because we know what X, Y and Z are. It becomes less about the dif- ferences in bowling styles and more about why those differ- ences don’t matter. “It’s exciting to learn about
the pieces and how the pieces all work together as opposed to lumping them into some mish- mash and calling it a cranker style or a stroker style. We can learn so much more if we look beyond the labels.”
MYSTERY MAN: Is Team USA star and popular pro Chris Barnes a tweener or a power stroker? Is he a cranker? He has been called all of these during his career.
USBOWLER 27
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