Tracking Your Bowler Statistics with Simple Tools

Hi there, welcome to the Bowling Academy. We're here in Brigham City, Utah, at Storm Incorporated, and a great facility they've got. They've done some renovations to it. It's a wonderful place. We get the great fortune now of getting a chance to work with a USBC Gold Certified coach, coach Hank Boomershine, also the Vice President, North American sales and R&D here for the Storm Company.

We've got a great opportunity to really use your expertise, your knowledge, all your experience that you've got, and really offer some good information to our audience out there. Once again, thanks for being here, we appreciate that. Today, we're going to talk a little bit about how we can help measure some bowler tools, right? We're going to take a good look at kind of what we can measure for our players, and how we can get them some information they can take and use immediately. Absolutely.

A lot of times, coaches and players, they're always wanting to know, "Hey, what's the statistics?" Because we are in a society that wants to know everything. I mean, we're watching TV where you watch a shot tracer on a golf ball go out there. And they're like, they're telling you it curves eight degrees here and there. And many times players, they want to know what their ball speed. They want to know their rev rate.

They want to know, "What's my axis tilt and rotation?" "Cause I keep hearing those terms, coach." Or the player just wants to know for themselves. And so, many times we don't have the luxury of some of these things that we have behind us here. CATS units and Bolt System. Those are things that are highly, highly advanced and quite costly. So I'm going to show you today how to find out some of those statistics, just with a simple iPhone and iPad, a coaching application, and a couple little charts and a couple little graphs, and we're going to gather all of those, that data that the player and coach was looking for.

Great information. As a player, as a coach, I always want to have access to data. Like I said, technology moves fast, our players want information. So let's go give them some ideas on exactly how they can use their tools at home, what they've already got, and learn how to become a stronger player in their game. Sounds good, let's do it.

Hey, players and coaches. Steve and I talked a little bit about catching those bowler statistics. First one, and to me, the most important is ball speed. Because we want to know the ball speed off the player's hand. And many times we look at those scoring units down the lane.

It tells us, "Hey, my ball speed was 14 miles an hour." But the thing is, it's the ball speed down the lane. And a lot of things happen from the time the player lets go of it until it gets to the pins. You get some friction from the lane. If the lane hooks a little bit more, the ball slows down more. If you use a ball that has a high friction surface, it's going to slow down some more too.

So most important is to get the speed off the player's hand. So that's right at release, and right as it crosses about the arrows. And so today, simple little iPhone right here. We carry it around, we talk on it all the time, but it has a stopwatch on it, and most phones have a stopwatch on it. So find that stopwatch in your phone.

So once you get out there on the approach, why don't you get to the lane to the right or to the left of the player, so you can be to the side of that player, and gather that when they let go of that bowling ball, and then you start that stopwatch. And when it crosses the arrows, stop that stopwatch. So you have a start and a stop. So started on the release, stop it as it crosses the arrows. And I want you to do this for three or four times, and gather an average of what you get in those deliveries for the player.

And what that does is gives you an average time for that players letting go of it from that release position 'til it crosses the arrows. And we have a nice little map for you today, to kind of show you where those numbers fit into that grid, and gives you the estimated ball speed. Now this isn't going to be to the 10th of a mile an hour. But many players, we're just trying to get an estimated ball speed off their hand, because many coaches, we use speed, rev rate, and other things to learn more about that player. Hey, coaches and players, we talked a little bit before about those bowler statistics, and the first one we gathered was speed.

So I showed you a couple of ways to do that. Grab the phone out of your pocket, stopwatch, iPad, whatever you need to use to gather the speed. Because speed is one of the most important things for statistics of a player, but the second to us, and figuring out ball reactions, and layouts, and things like that is rev rate. Because speed and rev rate are the two most dominant factors on a bowling ball. So in rev rate, it's a few more tools needed by that.

I think you've seen a few of the segments over the years of finding a PAP, and the things that we use, and the great tools that are provided by the industry is an Armadillo to map the track out. You start with the grease pencils. So we're going to go around the ball with a grease pencil on the very first line of the track. Once we map that out, we do use the Armadillo. We lay it onto that ball, and we'll show you today.

We'll lay it on the ball. We'll match up the line to the track. That gives us a point to mark the axis. So once we get that axis marked, we'll take that good old piece of bowlers tape. We'll put that on the players axis.

So now we have the axis point. Then we're going to throw a few shots to check to make sure that the access point is in the right spot off the player's hand. And then moving from that, we're going to take a little piece of masking tape, and we're going to put a piece of tape from the positive access point over to the center of grip, because we're going to use this as a reference guide to finding rev rate. Because when we take the video of this player doing the rev rate, we use that piece of tape like an hour hand on a clock. And we're going to watch as that hour hand travels around that bowling ball.

And that gives us that amount of rotation that we're doing in a timeframe. And the final thing we're going to need for this is I like to use an iPad. It's a mini, you can use a bigger, you can use a tablet, but we're going to use an application. You can use Coach My Video. There's several different applications for coaching videos.

We're going to open that application, and we're going to take the images, or video images of that player release. And I'm going to get you down low, close to the players feet, close to that release point, so that you can see when that player lets go of the ball. When the thumb exits the ball, that's going to be our starting point. And then I'll give you a method, two different methods actually, on how to find that rev rate for that player off their hand. Because many times those players always ask you, "Hey, what's my rev rate?" Cause, you know, it's kinda like, people like to puff their chest, "I'm 400 RPM's," or whatever.

So they want to know how they compare to the players around them, to the players that are on those PBA and PWBA telecasts. When those announcers say, "Hey, we have Jason Belmonte on the show today," "and he's got 550 RPMs," and you're going "Well, where do I stand in relation?" So now as a coach, as a player, you'll be able to find out your rev rate too. Coaches and players, we've gathered the data now. We've put that piece of tape on the positive access point. We took the tape back over and masking tape back over to center grip.

So now we have a orientation line on the bowling ball. So we can measure the rotation as the player lets go of it. Now remember, we want to catch the rotation in the first 15 feet, 20 feet of the lane, because that's truly what the player does to a bowling ball. And as the ball travels down the lane, friction and weight block and core mass start to take over a little bit, and can actually bump the rev rate up a little bit more as the speed comes down. So, in that video application that you're using, and the first one I used was a simple video capture called Coach My Video, that I can click off 10 frames at a time.

And as I click off those 10 frames, what I'm doing is I'm watching the rotation. So we have the bowling ball, player releases a bowling ball, and as he releases it, we have an axis point. And this axis, this piece of tape that's on the ball is going to travel around the ball, much like a clock. So what we're going to do is we're going to count the rotations of that. So as this piece of tape travels around the ball, it's like the hand on a clock.

So it travels around. So like an hour hand on a clock. So in the player that we did today, he got two and a half rotations on that 10 frames that we clicked off. So the cameras catch it at 30 frames per second. So 30 frames per second, most applications run it at 30 frames per second, some phones run a little faster, but when you open it up in a coaching application, they usually bring it down to about 30 frames per second.

And in the settings on many of those applications, you can check to see where that's at. So the thing you need to know for that is, because that's going to tell us how many images are collected each second, so that when we click off in a timeframe, we know what we're looking for so we can get an accurate rev rate. So we're saying, we're going to get close. We're not dead to the number, but we need to get an average rev rate for each player. So when I do that, so this player we gathered.

He rotated it two and a half times in those 10 frames that we caught. Now, 10 frames. What we're looking at here is, and we have a nice chart that we've provided for you. So at 30 frames per second, if we take 10 frames, divided by 30, that gives us a number of 0.33. And that number is going to be used for us, cause we can take that two and a half, and we can divide that by that 0.33.

Or we can take 2.5 and times it by 0.33. Both of those will give us a number of 7.5. Now that's 7.5 rotations per second. Now we need to know what it is in a minute. So in a minute, we're going to times that by 60, and that will give us 450 RPM's.

So that's how we find that players rev rate. Just with the use of a simple couple of pieces of tape, with a little iPad and a device. I don't need, you know, we've got a little system behind us here, costs about a hundred thousand in a CAT System. So, things that you have in your pocket, you can find those bowler statistics pretty accurately. All right, coaches and players.

We've gathered the first two most important parts of that bowlers statistics, speed and rev rate. Very, very important in the equation, but there are two others out there too, that many times people always ask, "Hey what's that rotation and tilt?" So today, we also have another way to measure tilt and rotation. And you've seen it in many of the other Academy videos, where we've talked about tilt. We've talked about rotation, but I thought, "Well heck, let's just give you all of it" "in one big segment." So now on the image you see in the screen here, we're going to show you an overlay of the bowling ball at that players release. And in that, what we're looking for is, you're going to see a crosshair on that ball.

And on that crosshair on that bowling ball, you're going to see an axis point. So we overlay on this bowling ball, the crosshairs, the center of the bowling ball. So now the axis point becomes that reference point in relation to that crosshair. Now, the horizontal measurement left to right gives us the axis rotation as that axis point is closer to the outside of the ball. That means that has less axis rotation.

As it gets closer to the middle of the ball, player gets around it more, the axis rotation, that's more what we call a higher axis rotation, or 90 degrees of axis rotation. Now, as that measurement goes from horizontal to vertical, as that axis point goes higher, the tilt goes up as well too. So in many videos throughout the Academy, you've seen where they've talked about low tilt, high tilt. Now as a player or a coach, you know exactly where you fall. So today we learned about those differences between speed, rev rate, tilt, and rotation, and how to find them using some very simple tools.

Okay, Coach Hank. Informationally, not only some good pieces, but really some simple stuff that players can take home. Ball speed. We're talking, looking at rev rates. We're really talking about axis rotations and tilt.

I mean, the basic information that a Pro Shop operator, a coach, a player may just want themselves. A great look across the board at really how a player can not only capture that detail, but how they can effectively use it, and then how they can be as accurate and repeatable in getting that data from shot to shot and from time to time they go to practice. And the greatest thing is, in the end of the day, it's just some simple tools to find that. And it's the nice, viable information. Like you said, the pro shop operator, when you're laying out some bowling balls, and the coach to say, "Hey this is kind of what you need." And when the coach says to a player, "Hey, speed to rev rate needs to match up." Now the picture starts to become more clear.

Yeah, it's easy. And once again, appreciate all the information. We're glad to have this, and hopefully the players out there and the coaches can use this moving forward. Great information guys, take it, use it on the lanes, make sure it's part of your game. We'll learn how to use that data, because that's going to help drive not only the performance on your lanes, on the approach, but it's going to help those scores go up as well.

So take the information. Thanks again, appreciate it. Use this when you get out to your next couple of practice sessions, or when you get to make yourself a better player.