Technique
2010 PBA regional. And that other O’Keefe Brueggemann had his eye on? Shannon was his wife. “When I first talked to Shannon, I knew
she was a great fit. Then it was just a matter of whether we could entice them both,” Brueg- gemann said. “I asked them to just come out, let’s talk, and visualize what it might be like for them to come down together.” The O’Keefes came to talk. And then they
came for good. “It just felt right from the very beginning,”
Shannon said. “Bryan asked me that night how I felt about it on a scale of one to ten. I told him it felt like more than a ten to me.” Bryan will oversee both programs as McK-
endree’s Director of Bowling; Shannon will coach the women’s team. Dennis Knepper remains the men’s head coach. “Shannon is an icon in the industry, and
Bryan’s technical knowledge, his contacts within the industry, and his access to top- ranked players at the youth level is going to be beneficial to our future success,” Bruegge- mann said. Shannon and Bryan recently shared with
Bowlers Journal Interactive some of that ex- perience and technical knowledge they will bring to McKendree. Specifically, they offer four key areas in which aspiring collegiate players must tune up their games if they dream of bowling for a marquee collegiate program. Here they are:
KNOW THAT MODERN BOWLING
IS A CHESS MATCH Bryan and Shannon both believe their main goal coaching collegiate bowlers is to make
TIPS AND TRICKS TO MAKE YOU A BETTER BOWLER
motion is critical. We will teach them how to recognize those changes at a quicker rate so that they don’t feel like they’ve wasted frames. So, overall, I think our first goal will be to make them smarter players. “The guy who is most emblematic of
the modern game is Chris Barnes. He under- stands it, and he is a master technician. He’d be the Bobby Fisher of the modern game of bowling. He’s a thinker, and that has added years to his career. He’s not 25 anymore; now he’s in his mid-forties, and yet he is still argu- ably one of the best two or three players in the world because he is so smart in all areas of the game. He is able to see that invisible playing field more quickly than other players. At McKendree, we will teach our players to do that.”
UNDERSTAND THE PLAYING AREA Shannon’s experience coaching girls between
Bryan O’Keefe advises that the best way to deal with the brutal lane conditions college players tend to face is to develop a keener awareness of scoring pace. “We will need to teach our players that there will be a time when you will need to bowl 230, or you will need to bowl 1,000- 1,050 for a five-person team. And then there will be times when a 950 will be just as good as 1,100,” he said.
them smarter so that they are prepared to play what Bryan calls the “chess match” that is today’s bowling game. “In today’s game of bowling, you’re basi- cally playing an invisible game of chess. The
lane condition is always changing with every single shot—especially in collegiate competi- tion where you have 10 players on a pair. The lanes are changing so much just from frame to frame. So being able to learn and read ball
ages 10 and 14 through USBC’s USA Bowling program, where they bowled on World Ten- pin Bowling Association patterns each week at the ITRC, taught her that coaches some- times make hasty assumptions about promis- ing youth bowlers. “Even with some of the older players,
you just assume that there are certain things they know because they’re good players, but then you find out that they don’t know,” Shannon explains. “I would ask them, what’s the big dot? What board is that? Where are you standing and where are you looking? In practice, I would tell them they had to tell me what boards their ball rolled over. “I just really wanted them to become familiar with the playing area. I got them to
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