Progress Isn't Linear and Other Inconveniences
You don't get to choose when the *click* happens
I was warming up during my second qualifying attempt at the 2026 Heritage Traditional in https://fivepinbowling.substack.com/publish/post/203306796Red Deer, Alberta, when something happened and I completely missed it. If I’d known it might be significant, I might have paid more attention.
I arrived in Red Deer after nearly three months without a tournament and a week-long stint as a software consultant in breathtaking Athens, Greece. Well… I’d coached at a tournament in the interim, but I’d spent most of those three months practising, focusing on simplifying my approach, simplifying my thoughts, and concentrating on keeping my eyes on the target. It turns out that looking at the target makes it easier to throw the ball there. Why did nobody drill this into my head when I was a teen?
Oh… they tried? And… you’re saying I didn’t listen? And that was the beginning of decades of bad habits that I’m only now beginning to fix?
Huh.
Three Months Prior…
Well, three months prior, I had bowled in Timmins, Ontario at the Timmins Invitational and in Winnipeg, Manitoba at the Manitoba Open. More tournaments, more moral victories, but no more playoff appearances.
In Timmins, I nearly sneaked into the playoffs the first night, finishing with 265, then 292, then 333 to scratch and claw my way to 2084. This was a measly 44 pins away from the money and a distant 87 pins from moving on to the next round of the High Roller event. I shot 1305/5 for the middle five games on Friday morning, but stumbled to 1984, which was nowhere near playoff range. Saturday was disastrous, when I was plagued by left shoulder pain, failed to score even 250 in any game, and finished at 1759. After a terrible result like that, I didn’t feel very optimistic about my chances.
Overall, I finished 52nd, 82 pins back of the playoffs. Once more, I came within 100, but once again, I had to settle for a moral victory in place of a “real” one.
In Winnipeg, well… the less said, the better. I injured my left middle finger in an incident with a bowling ball and shot a very disappointing 773/4 in the first round of the Last Person Standing event, making me one of the first four players eliminated out of 25. During the Main Event, I scored 1758 and 1654 in my qualifying attempts—I can’t even pretend to care which score happened on which day—and couldn’t even see the playoff cut line with zero cloud cover. In 16 games, I scored 323 once and nothing over 250 after that.
As you can imagine, I came home in February feeling like all this work were for nothing. Even so, I came away from these tournaments with one clear ray of hope: when I saw the ball clearly roll over my target, my shots were very accurate. Maybe that was all I needed? That informed my practice plan when I returned home.
Present Day
I was warming up on lane conditions that one might describe as “potentially challenging”. The approaches felt incredibly slick and I was really, really sliding. A long way. Uncomfortably far. Even so, I stuck with my preparation of the past two years: My body will figure out how to stop. Eventually. It’ll be fine.
The qualifying shift went well: I finished 17th out of 27 bowlers with a score of 2030. In the middle I had a triple of 885 and I missed the infamous 225 pot by scoring 197 in game 2. I walked out of the bowling center feeling hopeful and even satisfied. Certainly, the scoring conditions were quite good, so I had to consider the possibility that my scores were inflated, but a result is a result. A qualifying attempt score such as 2030 certainly beats 1750!
At some point during warm-up for that second qualifying attempt, it hit me: if I simply keep my eyes on my target, if I can see the ball roll over it, then I will have the results I’m looking for. I’d had this observation more than once before, and I’d even written about it before, but this time it felt different. It felt real. It felt less aspirational and more certain. I felt like I could actually do it.
This reminds me of a definition of “confidence” that I find very helpful:
Confidence is the belief that what you do impacts the outcome. The opposite of confidence is a kind of fatalism, the belief that things merely happen to you and lie entirely outside your influence.
I had finally started feeling confident about the connexion between looking at my target and throwing accurate shots.
Later, during the Four Hundred North Lifestyle Invitational, I would repeat this simple approach with a strong Parisian accent in order to make it more memorable:
If you keep your eyes on ze target, ze ball go zere!
And I kept my eyes on the target and the ball went there.
The biggest click happened during games 4 and 5 of that second qualifying attempt in Red Deer, when I scored 242 and 258 in back-to-back games without throwing two consecutive strikes. I executed consistently; I remained determined; I made the spares. When I looked up after 5 games, I had scored 1279 for 5 games (including an 806 triple) and had done that with relatively few strikes.
At that moment, I had the strangest thought:
I think I’m finally ready to try to find strikes.
I had graduated from just throw the ball over the target and hit the middle as much as possible to find alternative targets that might result in more strikes. For the first time since… well, ever… I truly believed that I had built The Machine, that I had developed the fundamental shot fully enough, and that I was ready for the next level. I was ready to figure out how to score, because I finally learned how to throw the ball.
A few weeks after Red Deer, I rolled into Brighton, Ontario for the Presqu’île Lanes year-end Scotch Doubles tournament. This is a fun format: true No Tap (any 4 pins down on the first ball is a strike) with a Mulligan (one do-over per game if you didn’t like the first ball of your frame). In a format such as this, alternating frames, much depends on the biorhythms synchronizing between partners. Fortunately, one of my partners and I happened to mesh, resulting in 2478/8 including a 394 game to finish. Fine, this is No Tap with a Mulligan, but averaging 310 works for me, even in that environment. Most importantly, I noticed two key things:
I found it straightforward to keep thinking about Just One Thing: my eyes on the target.
I didn’t even keep my eyes on my target particularly well! There was significant room for improvement.
Putting these two things together gave me a great deal of optimism.
And that led to Midland, Ontario, and the Four Hundred North Lifestyle Invitational. I managed to keep my mind mostly on Just One Thing. Remember?
If you keep your eyes on ze target, ze ball go zere!
I concentrated on this pretty well: a strong B+.
And the results speak for themselves:
First, a qualifying attempt of 2114, including 1350 for the first 5 games.
Next, to my utter shock, a day off! I decided not to bowl Friday, waiting instead to follow the results and judge whether I needed to try to improve that score by bowling Saturday.
Next, a qualifying attempt of 2130, including 1400 for the first 5 games, and, as it turns out, the strange experience of knocking myself out of the top 24!
Finally, a first-round 5-game match loss (!) by 1456 to 1382. My opponent punched a headpin in the 9th frame of the last game to give me hope, but then I immediately punched a headpin in the 9th frame to snuff that out.
It was the first time scoring 2100 twice in the same tournament. It was the first time scoring 1350 for 5 games three times in the same tournament. (And even the first time in the same month!) And here’s the scary part: I don’t think I bowled as well as I can. I bowled well; I grade my shot execution at A+, but I grade my concentration at about a B+. There is more in there.
I believe that this largely completes my transformation from an excellent mediocre bowler to a decent excellent bowler. I trust now that I’m no longer bumping up against the limit of what I can achieve with my habits; I now have habits that allow me to break through to a higher level of performance. That click I felt in Red Deer was evidence that I could safely turn my attention to trying to score (finding alternate shot lines, try smaller adjustments to speed and rotation) rather than focusing only on trying to throw the ball consistently.
As recently as a year ago, when everything was working really well, I could average 250, sometimes a little more. Now, even with “only” good-but-not-great concentration on my target or perhaps with great concentration but in scoring conditions that don’t match my preferred shot, I can probably average 250 and more. And, as I’ve now seen, when everything is working well (but not even really well), 280 is truly within reach.
Big, if true. Let’s see what happens!
So why has any of this worked? Well, it’s complex, so nobody really knows. Even so, here are the ingredients that I believe have been the key:
Allowing disappointment to flow through me: feel it, then let it fade.
Dampening reactions showing annoyance, anger, frustration, and the like.
Finding three things to like about every practice session, every qualifying shift, every session of bowling.
Relentlessly simplifying my approach and narrowing my attention to one element of my shot.
Remaining determined to keep going.
Boring, I know. Cliché, I know. I genuinely believe that this has been a matter of gradually accumulating helpful habits, then remaining determined until the loud “click” happens. I had to stop trying to make it happen, but rather trust the logic of the process, and just keep going until it happened. And I think it happened on a Friday afternoon in Red Deer. Why not?
Click.