Picking the Best Bowling Balls for Your Arsenal

When it comes to preparing your arsenal for tournament play, it’s highly important that you be versatile and adaptable to small changes on the lane, as often seen in collegiate tournaments. That’s because collegiate tournaments are unpredictable for oil patterns and lane conditions; there’s no telling what you’ll face ahead of time, so you have to bring a wide variety of bowling balls with vastly different reactions. In this lesson, we introduce some of the expert thinking that should go into picking the best bowling balls for a tournament arsenal when the lane conditions are a mystery.

How to pick the best bowling balls

First things first when selecting the best bowling balls for your tournament arsenal, you must keep in mind that versatility is essential. You can focus solely on using your benchmark ball and hope you’ll face conditions that allow you to stick with it, but chances are that won’t be the case. In reality, you should select your bowling ball arsenal based on the reactions you know you can achieve with each your best bowling balls on a range of patterns.

Our coaches will teach you how to incorporate various covers and cores into your arsenal and pay attention to the ball path you get with certain types of bowling balls. Using a collegiate bowler as an example, they talk about how to assess the amount of energy your best bowling balls create and the resulting reactions they experience.

You’ll also learn in this demonstration how to prepare your best bowling balls for tournament play through experimenting with surface types. Before heading to a tournament, it’s important that you test out various forms of sanding and polishing on your best bowling balls to find the right reactions you want to achieve on the lane. And as always, be sure to clean your ball after every shot!