Switching Between Indoor and Outdoor Bowls

As somebody who plays short mat bowls in the winter and crown green bowls in the summer, sometimes I wonder about the effects of “moving from one to the other” as one season ends and the other begins.

When playing short mat bowls, my delivery technique is different to the one I adopt for crown green, as my action has much less of a follow through. This is something that adjusts naturally during my first game of the short mat season; usually after I’ve launched a few woods into the fenders at 100 miles an hour! Usually though, it takes no more than a few ends before I’ve reined in my bowling arm and am playing with the more softly softly approach that’s better suited for indoors. 

However, when I step on the green at the beginning of the crown green bowls season, my delivery seems to take longer to readjust and until it does, I feel like I’m throwing myself off the mat just to reach 19 metres!

My first few roll ups generally consist of me “firing” my woods across the green to try and break the gentle action I’ve been using for the past 6 months! Because of this, I tend to be a bit of a slow starter in terms of finding my weight at the beginning of any outdoor season.

It’s these slow starts that have got me thinking about whether playing both short mat and crown green is a disadvantage. Like most sports, confidence is a pretty big deal if you want to be successful and so if you have a bad start to a season, it can sometimes be difficult to overcome it and get back into a winning routine.

On the other hand, playing short mat during the winter does help with keeping you in the right mindset with a competitive mentality. Without it, I reckon I would probably start the outdoor season in the wrong frame of mind, having not played competitively for some months. And this could just as easily result in a bad start to the season.

Either way though, I have too much fun playing short mat bowls to give it up, so I guess the only way to overcome my slowness out the blocks is pretty obvious – I just have to get out there on the green as early as I can and get my outdoor bowling arm firing on all cylinders again!