It's been a while since I considered what I was doing at the lanes to actually be good but I have seen some improvement. This past week I did alright but in the top tier we have a section we call the premiere league where the top 8 bowlers out of 30 or so of us compete for the top prize each week. The way it works is that you have to compete to get into the premiere league but every week one of those people has to be relegated as well. For several weeks I have narrowly avoided getting relegated even though I have played significantly better than I was doing a month or so ago.
I have not been doing well though. I was just doing well enough to not get eliminated and this past week was a very good example of how "good" our top league is. I bowled a top score (out of two games) of 144, which isn't good but also isn't terrible. The person who ended up getting eliminated bowled a top score of 142 and well, she got pushed back down to the lower league.
As fortune would have it I was randomly selected to bowl for the title of overall champion next week and unless something absolutely magical happens, I am almost certainly going to lose but I am just hoping that it isn't too embarrassingly bad.
We've been having some pretty big crowds lately and on one week if just one more person had turned up we wouldn't have had a spot for them. The bowling alley reserves 8 lanes for us and 2 of those lanes have only 2 people bowling on them for the 2 championships. The other 6 lanes have 3 people on them so normally we have a cap of 22 people because I will NOT put more than 3 people on a lane. If I do it will take too long. Fortunately, when we had 25 people turn up one of the lanes that wasn't reserved for us was going unused just by chance so we were able to accommodate the extra three people. But in the future if more than 22 turn up, we may have to tell whoever arrives last that they cannot bowl. I don't want to do that but that is just the way it works!
one of the fears that new people have when bowling with us is that they aren't going to be good enough and it is going to be shameful for them and they will feel bad. But the above scores are proof that you need not worry about that. All 3 of these people have been bowling with us nearly weekly for the past several years and when they bowl like this, which is pretty terrible, nobody makes fun of them and honestly, nobody really cares if you are good or not.
This is mostly just a social thing and that's all we ever really wanted it to be. There are some people that take this quite seriously, such as a few of the people in the Premiere League, but for the most part people are very easy going and we would actually be kind of upset if someone that is really good were to come and join us because we had that happen in the past and we had to ask Stanley to not bowl with us anymore because he was just too good and he was going to win everything every week. He understood even though he did fuss a bit about it. But when I asked him to not compete anymore it wasn't really a request, I was trying to be nice and if he had refused to elect to stop participating I would have just disallowed it. I don't like to pull rank but ultimately this is the league that I started, and I will be the judge and jury about who is allowed to play in it.
It stops being fun if there is ever anyone that is dominating and I alone will be the judge of who that is and isn't.
For the most part this league is social and if anyone starts any crap about rules or "cheating" or gets too serious about the play we do have a system in place that has rules but ultimately me and one other person who kind of organize all the stuff and are the sole reason why this is kept inexpensive with our deal with the lanes are the final word in the actual rules. Mostly the bowling is just a preempting for the partying that takes place afterwards and if anyone introduces any sort of animosity I will have a chat with them about calming the eff down and if they do not, they will be shown the door.
In nearly 5 years we have only had a single incident of someone losing their cool and it was completely stupid. He was banned from continuing to play that day and then he made a scene as he left and I would alter find out that he ended up getting beat up at a local pub because as it turns out he is just a problematic dude in general.
He has not attempted to come back to bowl with us ever since and that's a good thing.
Next week when I bowl for the belt I am going to try my best of course but considering that my opponent bowled every single one of his games at over 150 last week and my high score was 144 (the other was a 132) I am not very hopeful on actually winning. I suppose we will see. Magic has happened for me in the past before... can it happen again?