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Performance Bowls Greens the key to Bowls Club Survival

The quality and consistency of the playing surface on your green and your club’s chances of long term survival are inextricably linked, why?

Well if we consider the sport of bowls as a business for a minute it is clear, at least in the UK , that there is a vast over supply in the bowling marketplace. There simply isn’t enough demand for bowling to sustain the sheer volume of clubs that currently exist. The reasons for this are manifold and include some really “deep” factors which economists and sociologists might describe as, well… socio-economic, but the most important thing for bowling clubs to consider is that there simply aren’t enough bowlers around to make every UK bowling club economically sustainable. In other words some, maybe many, clubs will perish  in the years to come.

Of course, there are big picture issues that can be addressed and might help to improve the uptake of the game, like for instance the way bowls is marketed, and the general image of the game, perhaps more TV coverage of tournaments would help. All of that is big stuff, that can and will take a long time to bear fruit.

Meantime, if we come back to the close up view, the view out of your clubhouse window in fact, we can all start to do something this year to give our own club the greatest chance of survival; and that is tocommit to providing our members, visitors and prospective members with the best green possible to play on. This one thing is, in my opinion,  the key to growing the game again from the ground up in the years to come.

The 2 greatest barriers to the average bowling club making such a commitment are :

  1. the perceived cost and…
  2. the perceived difficulty associated with such a plan.

The key word here is “perceived” and there is good reason for that as we saw yesterday when we looked at inconsistency, traditions, desperation mode and greenkeeping myths all of which add to the perception of great expense.

If you’ve been reading my posts this week you will know that my new book Performance Bowling Greens is due to be released on this site on Monday 15th February and my major impetus for sitting down to write the book in the first place was to banish the notion that Performance Bowling Greens are prohibitively expensive and/or difficult to produce consistently.

In Performance Bowling Greens I detail a no-nonsense blueprint that you can follow to get the ultimate Performance from your Bowling Green. This really is a break with tradition (and if you read my post yesterday you will know the truth behind tradition) and a re-evaluation of how Performance Bowling Greens actually work. The book dispels all of the commonly accepted Greenkeeping Myths and moves straight to the program you must follow to achieve the highest level of performance and consistency from your green. Above all I have written the book in a way that will give you the confidence to just get on and do it.

Yesterday I shared with you my thoughts on the main reasons that clubs fall into the cycle of inconsistency and therefore perpetual disappointment with their greens. Today I would like to re-stress just how important it is that your club starts to follow a structured improvement plan aimed at producing a high performance green consistently over the long term.

When you pick up your copy of Performance Bowling Greens next Monday you will have a step by step blueprint that you can follow to turn your green around for good and start to enjoy the extra security such a green will provide for your club. The most important aspect of the book is that it details an approach that any club can take and in almost every case, it won’t only improve the green’s performance dramatically but will also return a significant financial saving to the club.

I will share a typical bowling club story with you and if you don’t recognise your own club within the story its possible that you already have a high performance bowling green.

Remember you can get your copy of Performance Bowling Greens in the shop

What does solid tining a bowls green achieve?

This question arises a lot in my travels. Usually for one reason:

The greenkeeper is trying to follow his or her own “imagined” version of my Performance Greens Program and has distilled this down to just the “no topdressing” bit!

The slightly skewed logic then dictates that they don’t remove any plugs (cores) from the green this year due to the fact that they won’t be topdressing and will therefore leave holes that won’t be filled in and of course won’t be healed for next season.

So depending on the soil and turf conditions solid tining can be useful or not so useful.

If the green is thatchy and wet, solid tining will at best achieve nothing but at worst actually cause things to deteriorate by compacting the surface even further by creating holes with smeared edges that don’t allow water through.

On reasonably healthy greens where the underlying thatch is under control and the soil is reasonably friable, solid tining can create some good air space to allow soil microbes to thrive and to allow surface water roots and wetting agents down through the surface. It can also create a good seed bed for new seed if conditions are generally good.

I also recommend solid tining for heads and LDP affected areas prior to wetting agent application in the summer although this is usually with smaller, pencil type tines.

So overall it has its uses, but if it is merely being used to square the equation “what will we do if we aren’t top-dressing” then it is flawed logic.

On a thatchy green, there is no reason why hollow tining shouldn’t be employed even although you won’t be filling the holes afterwards.

An alternative program that actually makes a difference is discussed here.

Bowls Green Maintenance Public Enemy No.1

What is the single most important area of maintenance to concentrate on for a performance green?

If we want to save money on bowling green maintenance, where should we concentrate our spending?

What will give us the most bang for our buck?

3 variations of the same question that crop up on an almost daily basis here at bowls-central.

The answer is Thatch.

However, this simple one word answer is almost never received with the open arms I expect it to be.

After asking questions like the above, it seems that most enquirers are instantly deflated and disappointed with the brevity and simplicity of the answer, but this is the very essence of Performance Bowling Green Maintenance.

Click here to get started on your journey to a Performance Bowling Green.

For a Performance Bowls Green, start a new tradition!

In less than a week my new book, Performance Bowling Greens will be launched on this site; 15th of February to be precise. In the lead up to the launch we have been looking into some of the obstacles that stand in the way of the average bowling club achieving the performance they desire from their green. Today I want to look at one of those obstacles more closely and that is the obstacle that Tradition puts in our way. The trouble is that many of these “traditions” are really not that old. One of the most damaging of these is the “tradition” of top-dressing our greens with high sand content dressings every year.

Now I should warn you at the outset that this is a long one and you might want to grab a coffee before we get started. The reason for the length of this article is that I don’t just want to discuss the process of top-dressing; I also want to show you how damaging it can be to your green and how damaging it can be to your wallet. To do that I am going to re-present to you 3 of the most clicked on articles we’ve ever published on this site (which shows, I think, that many clubs already understand the problem). So here we go:

At most bowling clubs the end of September is when thoughts will start to turn to the autumn renovation program or the “closing of the green” as many clubs call it. Bowling clubs throughout the UK will take delivery of between 3 and 10 tonnes of very expensive top-dressing compost, which will be applied to the green after hollow tining or some other aeration operation, in the belief that Read more