yes as i said in my other thread, bowling is becoming frustrating but it seems like all i want to do is bowl. i bowl sundays tuesdays and thursdays and i hate the days i dont bowl. i sit in school very anxious to bowl and i love going to tournaments. if you gave me 2 lanes and a free day i would bowl all day. but its sad that i dont have the money to really practice because im only 14 and my parents wouldnt lend me the money to go bowling all the time. i also cant drop out of school to bowl which i dream of when im in school heh. i dont know many jobs that allow 14 year olds to work for them though so i practice maybe once a week when im not in league. does anybody else feel like this?

you bet. there are days when i'de rather be bowling than working. because its more fun than busting your be hind. but dont sweat it. you'll get the chance to bowl more one day. may be you can get a job at a bowling alley later on

Steven, have you looked into Junior programs at your local center? Many have them with instruction too. It is a good start.

I want to bowl all the time, but then I get the "You're not spending enough time with me..." speech from my fiance.

Steven, you have your whole life ahead of you and plennnnnty of time to bowl. I recommend staying focused on your studies, because it will pay off BIG TIME into your adult years. Trust me, as someone who is out of college with a degree, and able to bowl more now because of how I dedicated myself to school.

Focus on your grades, bowling in your spare time, and get into a good college that has a solid bowling team. Good academic performance and the ability to bowl a lot, go hand in hand.

I also want to bowl all of the time, but there is a deep satisfaction in knowing that all of my responsibilities (personal and professional) are taken care of. Then I can get out there on the lanes and really enjoy myself because I earned it!

Perfect reply!

If you can't bowl, there are plenty of ways to improve your game without bowling, like read all of the tips and articles on www.bowl4fun.com, learn Mo Pinel's dual angle system for laying out bowling balls to get any reaction you want at http://www.morichbowling.com/

You can practice your approach without a ball wearing socks and slide on a tile or wood floor. When you are walking down a hall way at school you can see if you can walk straight without looking by checking yourself against a line on the floor.

You can do squats to strengthen your legs, wrist curls to strengthen your wrist, and cardio to help your endurance.

You can also do meditation and visualize yourself bowling, strike after strike, this is the next best thing to actually bowling. If you break your approach down and visualize every movement to the foul line and visualize the ball going to your break point and making it's move through the pins, you will give yourself a good chance of actually doing this when you hit the lanes the next time.

get the parents hooked on bowling, and you'll be there everyday! i go whenever i can, and once the foul weather sets in, i take the family every saturday and we usually bowl from @ noon to 5pm [or untill they toss us out..]

Well I am the same way, although I do get to bowl a lot. I bowl atleast 5-6 times a week and atleast probably 6 games each of those days. How long have you been bowling for anyways Steven? Also, you can always get a job of mowing some yards, thats how I've made all my money for the past two years.

Coach Jim, Thanks for those ideas! I will definately have to use some! Especially when at school! =)

my parents are the ones that got me hooked into bowling and ive been competitively bowling since i was about 5-6 (i started around 2)

I wish i could bowl everyday now. Though i have to pay the bills and stuff so i dont think i could do that.

When i was in junior leagues i use to be at Bowling Alley almost every day. Either Bowling, Volunteering, or going with parents to there leagues.

My mom started working at the bowling alley in town when I was a freshman. If I didn't have some sort of sport practice, I was there. I knew the owner pretty well and he would let me bowl all of the time. When I got into college, there was an alley on campus that I started working at. I was in the alley every day. I was also bowling on the team so most of my extra time was spent in a bowling alley. At one time, I was bowling in 5 leagues a week and 2 practices a week as well as tourneys and other times I just went out and bowled. That was a different time though. No responsibilities. I was up around 50-100 games a week easy. Now, I bowl once a week. Then, I never missed league. Now, I have missed 4 weeks already and am not going again tonight so my wife can go to a meeting. That is what happens as you get older and start having kids.

I actually bowl on particular nights, basically the "unlimited bowling" nights. I pay a flat fee of somewhere between $6-$9 for the night and get about 2.5 or 3 hours of all I can bowl. I end up bowling a minimum of 2 times a week and usually get either 3 or 4 times a week. I can't imagine getting any less and I would always enjoy more

^ jeez, thats cheap. my 3 hour all-you-can-bowl is $18, and only on friday and saturday nights at that.

I didn't realize it was that cheap but I never thought it was expensive either so. Wow, $18 is more than I could afford to spend right now, I'm a college student and as if $30-40k a year isn't enough to tap someone out to start with tacking on almost $20 every night I want to bowl would definitely put me in the poor house. Being a commuter helps my tuition costs a bit but then gassing up the buggy sucks the wallet bone dry all over again. Between school, food, gas, bowling, bowling balls, and nights out I'm surprised my part time job is scraping by!

I don't want to sound like I'm rubbing people's noses in it, because that's not at all what I'm trying to do, but I hopefully should be bowling tonight actually for only about $7.50 from 11-1 tonight. Obviously having your own bowling shoes cuts the cost by 2 or 3 bucks a night so I went out when I first started bowling and bought a pair for both comfort and the fact that they basically paid for themselves and then some by now.

With the US economy the way it is, not to bring any politics or anything into this thread, money is tight for all of us, bowling lanes included I suppose

During the summer a few of the centers around me will do all you can bowl for 3 hours for about $9 on Sunday's. Now the cosmic bowling on Friday and Saturday nights are a different story and its at least $15 for usually 2 maybe 3 hours. Some run quarter-mania on some nights, usually in the summer where you pay about a $5 cover charge and then its twenty five cents a game.

fridays and saturdays at my home bowling alley is 52 bucks a lane for 2 hours on friday and saturday. But monday is pretty good tho. 2 hours for 5 bucks.

I think one of the centers I bowl in does that as well on cosmic, but I think it's $64 a lane but that's only feasible if you have 5 more more people on that one lane. This same center changes the price for cosmic on Saturday's from $15 to $17 a person.

Wow. I haven't bowled cosmic in about a year and only would plan on doing so if I had a group of friends. For me I find it a bit more challenging to stay consistent with my shots and my line when its extremely dark, smokey, flashing lights and loud music. But its still fun in the right situation. I would like to go again soon sometime if I can find a group of people and the right price

I haven't actually bowled cosmic in a while, but last season on Saturday's after the league was done. A group of us would stay and bowl Scotch Doubles pot games and often would still be on the lane well into the cosmic bowling. We would get away with it for as long as we could before they shut us down because they needed the lanes for paying customers. We would use free game passes to pay for the games bowled. Some of the guys would start complaining when the regular lights went out, while a couple of us would thrive on it. I could still make out my target so it didn't bother me at all, other than when one of the moving lights shined right in my eyes as I'm in my approach.