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How to use the Winter Months to Transform your Bowling Club.

A large proportion of Bowling Clubs are currently experiencing a downturn in their fortunes.

The finances at many of these clubs just don’t make sense, yet they struggle on year after year and somehow manage to hang on, even when member numbers are ridiculously low.

This shows a determination and drive by clubs to survive regardless of how hard things get and that is to be applauded.

However, so many of these clubs needn’t be struggling in the way they are now.

Ask any bowling club member; what is the most important attribute for a bowling club to thrive and they will say: A Great Bowling Green

Why is it then that the very industry that claims to be there to support clubs in achieving better quality greens is actually just bleeding the sport dry by continually hard selling products and services to cash strapped clubs when there is very good evidence that these methods are actually detrimental to the green.

How many bowling greens have you played on that are of consistently high performance year in year out?

How many crises, have you experienced on your green in the last 20 years and how many magic remedies have you tried to fix it with? More importantly, how much cash has your club burned through  in an effort to reach the Nirvana of a high performance and reliable bowling green?

Well the answer to all of this grief is to think differently about bowling green maintenance.

For too long we have been sold the idea that a few bags of this and a bottle of that will cure all of our problems, but this is Symptom Management in action.

The real causes of poor green performance are  the underlying problems on greens perpetuated by following flawed traditions in turf maintenance, such as top-dressing.

This plays us right into the hands of the salesmen, who don’t really want things to get better in the long term.

For this weekend only I have reduced the price of our best selling eBook: Performance Bowling Greens, a practical guide, in order to make sure that as many clubs as possible have access to this step by step plan for improving your bowling green for the long term.

This 100 page eBook:

  • Blows away all of the commonly held myths about bowling green maintenance.
  • Exposes the expensive greenkeeping “traditions” that run away with cash and actually harm your green.
  • Reveals an amazingly simple but powerful formula that you can follow to turn the performance of your green around starting today.
  • Details a sustainable and common sense approach to future maintenance that will allow your green to continue improving for ever more.
  • Explains what is actually going on under the surface so that you can easily measure progress at each step of the way.
  • Shows you how the majority of problems experienced on bowling greens are related very closely to just one common maintenance mistake that nearly every bowling club is making right now.
  • Leaves you with a comprehensive plan for your future maintenance, that will not only result in a high performance green, but will actually save the majority of UK clubs money on their maintenance bills.

I’ve included Performance Bowling Greens in a 72 Hour sale where you can also make great savings on all of our current publications.

If you have any questions you know you can always just drop me a line here.

Fulfilling your audience’s expectations.

The process of bowling club turnaround is divided into 7 key steps, one of which is to identify your club’s Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA), as explained and illustrated in detail in Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround.

Once you have a clearly defined SCA it is this that informs all of your publicity and marketing to the user groups and individuals you hope to attract as the loyal members and customers of the future.

This Marketing activity, which should be perpetual and which needn’t cost the club much in the way of hard cash, can be thought of as “promises” being made to prospective club users.

As an aside, if you are throwing real money at advertising, promotion and publicity…please stop unless you can produce documented evidence that proves that it pays for itself in new revenue every time. Please see Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround for help with this.

So, back to promises…

If you consider your marketing as promises made, then you’d better make sure you can live up to these, because nothing disappoints more than an experience that under-delivers on your expectations.

Being good at marketing is one thing, but being good at delivering, at shipping, at getting things done well and on time every time is where you can excel at fulfilling the expectations of your newly identified audience.

This comes down to your Business Strategy and although that sounds boring and maybe even unnecessary for a bowling club you can only skip this if you are already doing very well and don’t actually need help in turning your club around, or getting more members through the door or making more revenue per visitor, in which case you probably won’t have read down this far anyway!

Business strategy at first glance looks like one of those crazy, mixed up subjects that is never ending and impossible to get your head around completely…but it comes down to just one Read more

5 little known facts about creating a Performance Bowls Green

  1. Top dressing is counter productive to producing a Performance Bowling Green
  2. Following the Performance Bowls Green system reduces maintenance costs from day 1.
  3. Doing too much work on your green can be detrimental to its condition.
  4. The performance greens program has the long term effect of reducing the work needed on the green.
  5. Performance bowls greens can be maintained with zero pesticides, another saving.

Preventative fungicide

The agronomic advice received by many clubs with regard to winter maintenance is just wrong and no where is this more prevalent than in the advice given about fungal disease prevention.

A healthy, living soil contains many different types of fungi and only a few of them are potentially harmful to the green.

If the green and soil are maintained in a healthy condition, even the potentially harmful fungal pathogens like fusarium, take all patch, dollar spot, anthracnose etc, although probably still present, pose no real threat to the turf.

The soil under your green when in its natural state is a little eco-system all of its own and the balance of this eco-system is easily destroyed by clumsy maintenance practices.

Soil micro-organisms and all manner of beneficial fungi need to thrive under there to make your green work the way it should i.e. to a high standard with the minimum of chemical intervention. Beneficial soil fungi actually work with grass plants to help them take up essential nutrition from the soil.

For this reason, even a green that is knackered and at the very beginning of the Performance Greens turnaround process should not be subjected to blanket applications of any fungicide.

This is because broad spectrum fungicides are pretty blunt instruments and don’t differentiate between good and bad fungi, meaning that every blanket application is essentially turning your green away from the door at the Performance Greens Annual Dance!

The whole process of decline in greens due to “traditional” maintenance is detailed here.

The recovery process is outlined here.

One reader told me of his recent bill for fungicide totalling over £800; for a tiny fracftion of that money you can get yourself a map out of this madness here.

5 warning signs that your bowls green is dying

Many bowls greens have problems; its rare for a season to go by with only praise for the green  from members.

The majority of the problems encountered on bowls greens is directly attributable to the maintenance the green gets and the in particular the maintenance it has had over the years, especially the last 4 decades.

This is due in large part to the traditions that have taken hold in bowls green keeping that are wholly inappropriate to maintaining the green in a state of high performance.

There are many warning signs that your green is suffering but these 5 are the main ones that you should be aware of:

  1. Foot prints on the bowls green surface; if you regularly leave indentations with your feet on the green surface this is a sign that there is too much thatch building up. Thatch inhibits health by reducing access for oxygen into the green surface. Thatch also harbours fungal disease spores and can be a precursor to severe localised dry patch outbreaks.
  2. Yellowing leaves on grass plants; this is another sign that all is not well with the health of your bowls green and the soil underlying it. Yellowing or chloritic grass plants means that the turf is suffering from a lack of essential nutrients, or that the soil is lacking oxygen which is essential for the encouragement of beneficial soil microbes. There are many other reasons that grass plants could exhibit yellowing leaves, including fungal diseases but all of the possible reasons point to underlying problems with the green’s turf/soil relationship.
  3. The bowls green surface is unpredictable to play on; when a bowls green is unpredictable to play on from day to day or from rink to rink; sometimes slow, sometimes fast and with quirky draws this is a sign of underlying problems which could include localised dry patch, excessive thatch and compaction.
  4. Green surface looks patchy; again a patchy looking green, which has varying degrees of turf density, bare patches, weeds, moss or other grasses is usually suffering from a lack of soil oxygen and a low soil microbe population.
  5. Puddles on green surface after rain; this can be caused by excessive thatch, compaction or localised dry patch which causes the green surface to become hydrophobic or water repellent.

Problems such as these cannot and should not be dealt with on a piecemeal basis. All of these problems are simply symptoms of underlying issues. The decline of bowls greens is described in detail here and the answer to the problem is detailed here.