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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.

The Maintenance YOU MUST do now for a PERFORMANCE BOWLING GREEN next season!

Autumn and Winter Bowling Green Maintenance GuideHow has your bowling green performed this season?

If the answer is “brilliantly”! we truly have a high performance bowling green, then congratulations you probably need read no further.

However, if your club is like many I speak to then its probable that your answer will be somewhat less positive and that you could benefit from my new 34 page guide to Essential Autumn and Winter bowling green maintenance and preparation.

During this season has your green suffered from:

  1. Slow play?
  2. Un-even surface?
  3. Un-predictable rinks?
  4. Inconsistent surface?
  5. Soft and spongy turf?
  6. Bumpy rinks?
  7. Fungal disease, slime, moss, weeds or dry patch?

These are all common problems in the UK and the answer to beating them lies in the Autumn and Winter Maintenance you do starting NOW.

In my new Autumn/Winter Maintenance guide you will learn:

  1. The 3 most important issues in Performance Green Management
  2. The reason many greens never improve, this is an eye opener for many clubs!
  3. The Maintenance items you MUST DO NOW to prepare your green for next season
  4. The commonly used maintenance practices YOU MUST AVOID if you don’t want to make your green worse than it already is. Unfortunately, many clubs will already be preparing to undertake these tasks unaware that they are about to damage their green further.
  5. A guide to the Autumn/Winter maintenance you need to do to get your green off to a flying and early start next spring

Please don’t fall into the trap that many clubs will this autumn: make sure you are performing the correct maintenance tasks to give your green the best chance next season.

Autumn and Winter Bowling Green Maintenance Guide
Autumn and Winter Bowling Green Maintenance Guide
The ultimate guide to Autumn Renovation and Winter Bowling Green Maintenance detailing the essential maintenance your bowling green needs through this most critical of maintenance seasons. What you do now will determine how the green performs next season. INSTANT DOWNLOAD ebook more details
Price: £9.97

Beer application reduces maintenance costs by half!

Scientists in South America are developing a new strain of turfgrass that responds to applications of beer slops by only growing at half the rate of normal grasses.

Turf managers are already getting excited about the development saying that the beer swilling turf drastically reduces labour costs for bowling green maintenance and potentially creates a use for beer slops and half drunk pints from the clubhouse bar.

The breakthrough was spotted by accident by a greenkeeper at Lirpa Premia Bowling Club. When interviewed by Bowls-Central, greenkeeper Avril Primo said “its amazing, the grass seems to come up “half cut”, it’s going to revolutionise bowling greenkeeping the world over and I can finally put all of the half pints left over on Sunday night to good use”.

We tried to contact the Science team involved but we were told that we couldn’t speak to anyone until the second day of April.

Bowls Social Network

Getting started on bowls-central’s new social network is easy. In a few minutes you can be set up and start benefiting from the many new features the social network brings to the site and its members.

To get started just Register and you will be up and running in minutes.

Use the top most menu on the any page to register for your free membership and to organise and manage your profile and the type of content you want to get involved with.

What is a Member?

Everyone who signs up to bowls central is a member of the community and is free to use all of the site features including:

Activity Streams 

Activity Streams allow you to keep track of the information you are following on the site. Global, personal, and group activity streams with single-stream view. Included are threaded commenting, status updates, favourites, @mentions, RSS feeds, and email notifications.

User Groups

You can join user groups; I’ve set up some initial special interest groups and members are free to join any of these or request a new group specific to their interests.

Groups can be public, private or hidden to allow members to break the discussion down into specific topics.

Forums

Each user group has its own fully featured discussion forum to allow for more in-depth conversations between members. Simply add to an existing discussion or start your own in the forum that best suits the topic. If it isn’t there just request a new user group and forum and you’ll be up and running straight away.

Private Messaging

Private messaging allows members to talk to each other directly, in private. Members can even send messages to multiple recipients at a time.

Friend Connections

Members can make friend connections so they can track the activity of each other, and focus on the people they are most interested in.

Member Settings

Members can change their notification options and sensitive account information, for example to be notified by email when new activity occurs in a group they are interested in.

Future Developments

We will continue to add further features as and when they are available or by demand. This will include making it possible for every member to set up their own blog.

So don’t delay…join up today and join in the conversation on bowls central social! You can register here.

New Bowls Social Network

chat and share ideas within the new Bowls Social area

Today sees the launch of a host of new interactive features here on bowls-central.

Although not very prominent at the moment if you look at the top left of any main page you will see a new menu called Bowls Social Network, although we would like to arrive at a better name soon and I’ve put up a little competition to see if we can do that!

The new features include Special Interest Groups which you can join to enter the discussion with other members. Membership is free and setting up your profile is very straight forward.

I have set up a few starter groups including ones for the four home nations of Great Britain and Ireland and groups focussed on Performance Greens, Club Survival and Club Membership issues. I will be happy to set up any other relevant groups requested by members.

Once you join a group or groups you will have access to a host of features including discussion forums, private messaging, extended member profiles, friend connections, user groups, activity posting etc.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand everything at the outset just jump in and set up your profile today.

Its easy…just click here choose a user name and password and join the conversation today! Alternatively select “Register” from the Bowls Social Network menu at the top left of any main page.

I’ve put up a few starter questions on the forums to get things moving.

Site users who have previously signed up for the Bowls Club Mastermind Network will be able to sign in with their existing user name and password, or alternatively set up a new account.

As usual, if you have questions or need any help with any of this; just drop me a line by clicking here.

Hope to see you on our new bowls social network!

John Quinn

Big Christmas Thank you

Thank you to all of our readers for making bowls-central such a popular site among bowlers and bowling club managers.

We wish all of our readers a very peaceful festive and relaxing Christmas holiday and the best ever bowling New Year.

For the duration of the holiday period we have slashed the prices of all bowls-central publications including Performance Bowling Greens, Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround and Bowling Club Membership, Retention and Growth.

Please make sure you take advantage of these bargains while they last.

The bowls-central site will be open for business as usual throughout the holiday period.

Regards

John

Bowls Digest

With all of this snow I’ve been looking for excuses to sit close to the fire, but I was feeling guilty about not producing any benefit for my readers, so here is a short selection of resources and information I’ve found useful and interesting lately

Bowls World Blog

Although not brimming with content and not updated very regularly this blog has a couple of in depth articles that might be of interest; including a look at the bowls manufacturing process and some guidance on learning to bowl and improving your game. http://bowlsworldblog.blogspot.com/

Bowls World

The main site relating to the above blog has a wealth of products of interest to the bowler. http://www.bowlsworld.co.uk/

World Bowler

Good site with a quite a lively forum with bowlers contributing form all corners of the globe. http://www.worldbowler.com/

Julian Haines

A popular site with a very active forum with lots of interesting debate and opinion on all things bowls; check out the greenkeepers corner section. http://www.julianhainesbowls.co.uk/forum/

Bowls Club Info

This site claims to be the biggest list of lawn bowls links on the internet.
You’ll find links to bowls web sites from around the globe – from the smallest English country green to the largest aussie mega-club!
The site owner’s aims are to help promote all bowls club web sites by offering free inclusion in the links lists and to provide low-cost but professional looking web page hosting for bowls clubs. http://www.bowlsclub.info/

Statistical Analysis; to give you the Bowls Green Maintenance answers you need

Don’t worry, we’re not going all mathematical on you.

Over the past 2 years the traffic to this site has steadily grown and now provides help and advice to a big proportion of the UK Bowling Club Scene.

I know this, because like every website; in the background we have what are known as Web Stats or statistics.

The web stats provide a lot of good information and allow us to mould the content of the site to provide the kind of advice we think you want.

One of the really great parts of these web stats is the section that allows us to see what terms people type into search engines before being directed to the site.

For this month alone, the list extends to over 4 full A4 pages of search topics, many of them in the form of questions like for example “will too much water harm our green?” or “what are the favourable conditions for fusarium?”

So what I thought I’d do is start to answer some of these questions at the rate of perhaps 1 a day and see how we get on with that.

Keep your eyes peeled for our new “web search” Tag

Speak to you soon John

Bowls Club Success Manifesto

Speaking to club officials as I go around the countryside, it’s never long before the conversation turns to the difficulties in retaining members, keeping the club afloat and general club survival issues.

Of course, the time of year makes it all the worse, as clubs going into the winter with financial difficulties are obviously in a delicate condition. It’s never clear how many members will pay their subs again and want to come back next year.

For many clubs it doesn’t look great this year; the combination of the already prevalent factors related to the state of the game with the very strange series of weather events (very cold and prolonged winter, followed by a very cold and very dry spring, followed by a very hot and dry spell of weather for many of us in June and July) has left a lot of clubs with worries about their survival.

This has led me to change around my plans recently and prioritise my work to make sure you have access to the right kind of information at the right time.

So, although we said that our new eBook: Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround would be available at the end of August, we have delayed this until the 25th September, so that we could bring forward the release of our new Manifesto for Bowling Club Success.

I know, I know it’s a bit of a mouthful, but I think “manifesto” describes this new guide most accurately as it provides clubs with a document that can be adopted and then adapted into a declaration of your intention to work on a plan to rejuvenate your club’s fortunes.

Our Manifesto for Bowling Club Success includes 4 main sections as follows:

Part 1. Accepting the New Order of the Game

Part 2. Club Turnaround

Part 3. Long Term Strategic Planning

Part 4. How to Imbed Best Practice

It is available FREE now. Just click here to access your copy; and please let us know what you think and how you plan to use it in your club.

Bowls Green Maintenance and Club Survival

The link between Bowling Green Maintenance and Bowling Club Survival has never been more obvious…has it?

Later this week we will be releasing our new publication Bowling Club Survival and in it the process of Green Maintenance is shown to be critical in several different ways.

The most obvious link between Bowling Green Maintenance and Bowling Club Survival is of course that the club with a better green should be able to attract more members and tournaments, thus giving that club a better chance of surviving.

Secondly of course there is another obvious link; and that is that if we reduce expenditure on green maintenance then we will save costs and therefore give our club a better chance of survival.

Between these two clear survival strategies lies a quandary that many clubs have found themselves in for decades now:

“if we spend more money on Bowling Green Maintenance the green will be better; so if a better green would give us a better chance at Club Survival, we shouldn’t be cutting expenditure on Green Maintenance”

In Bowling Club Survival we will discuss why the answer to this argument isn’t as obvious as it seems and leave you with a clear strategy to make progress on this issue fast; but that’s only the beginning because this new guide will tackle 7 distinct strategies that must be mastered in order to give clubs the best chance of surviving the current challenges in both the economy and the game of bowls itself.

Please complete the form below to register your interest and we will ensure that you are among the first to be alerted when the guide is launched.