Last time, I made the claim that there are four things, namely, confidence, experience, adaptability and focus, which set the pros apart from the rest of us. This time, I want to illustrate some of the specific details of why these qualities are so important and provide some examples that bowlers aspiring to improve their own games might use as a benchmark for tracking their own progress.

First, let us discuss confidence. There is a reason why I mentioned this one first and that is because I feel it is the most important quality. The main difference I see between the pros and amateurs is that the top pros treat confidence as something which they are constantly managing and evaluating, while amateurs typically allow their confidence levels to wax and wane unchecked. What I mean by that is, for the top professionals, in order to win against the best competition in the world it is absolutely paramount that confidence is at a peak. Of course, even the best bowlers in the history of the PBA win less than 10% of the PBA Tour events in which they compete, so the trick for the pros is how not to allow all that failure to work against your confidence for your next performance. The way most of us accomplish this is through a cycle of honest assessment of every performance followed by a determination of what is needed to improve, followed by a corrective action. But the underlying foundation of this is a sense of purpose and drive that you will accomplish your goals. The coexistence of these two things together will allow you to manage your confidence in a way that keeps it building while minimizing the peaks and valleys.

Our next quality is experience, and I place this one second is because it is so closely interwoven with confidence. In bowling, maybe more than any other sport because of the constantly changing conditions, experience is of immutable valuable. Since so much of your success in bowling depends not only on execution but on maximizing your margin for error (both on the lane and with pin carry) having a wealth of experience to draw upon is going to give you a huge advantage in scoring well and competing. How does one gain this advantage? Simple! Go out and bowl! The more you practice, bowl in leagues and tournaments and study the game, the faster you’ll gain the experience you’ll need to get better. One of the most obvious reasons the pros are so good is because they spend the most time doing it. It is truly amazing how quickly the pros can find the right place on the lane that will give them room for error. On league conditions, the lanes are typically dressed in a way that makes it obvious where to play, but on PBA conditions, this is not always so apparent. Despite this, the pros are still able to manage incredibly high scores, which is a testament to the ability to discover margin for error and utilize it to maximize scoring.

Adaptability, of course, is a quality that goes hand-in-hand with experience. In fact, you might even go so far as to say that without adaptability, experience isn’t much use to us at all. The pros understand that conditions are constantly changing and that there will always be someone in the field who is going to figure out the right combination to the condition to set the scoring pace. If you are not willing to adjust your game to the conditions, then you are conceding defeat and might as well not even continue competing in the first place. The key to becoming an adaptable player is to constantly work on learning new ways to attack the lanes. My rule is to never walk out of the bowling alley lost or without a plan for how I would attack a condition on which I struggled the next time I might face it. If you do that, you’ll find that the solution to scoring on conditions on which you never thought you’d be able to compete will begin to come to you more frequently and more naturally. But you always have to keep an open mind and be willing to change if you believe something better and more conducive to higher scores comes along.

The last quality in which the pros exhibit such incredible skill is in the ability to focus. On the PBA Tour you discover quickly just how much money a simple lapse in concentration can cost you. It is absolutely amazing how much the difference in one or two pins a game over a week of bowling is equivalent to in terms of dollars. I think the main advantage the pros have in the ability to focus is that they are constantly working toward goals. Whether its winning the tournament or winning the match or earning money, those things all help creating incentive for a player to focus on the task at hand. Of course, one must be able to distance oneself from those thoughts during competition, but setting performance goals helps enormously in improving the ability to focus.

I hope these insights will help you in your own quest to become a better bowler. But even if they don’t, I hope they remind you of why the pros are so good at what they do.