High School Team Practice

[Flyer41]

While I am back home for Christmas break, I am helping out coaching my old high school team. I was wondering if anyone had some ideas for drills to teach the kids how to reduce ball speed. I've tried just explaining holding the ball lower means lower backswing etc. but they seem to want to fight the ball at release and muscle it back up to speed. Any suggestions would be appreciated! Thanks!

[billf]

Keep an open mind here.
Lower start position for the ball, lower back swing (assumed). So you're shortening the swing of the ball so it takes less time to complete. What do the legs then have to do to keep proper timing? Go faster. Where is ball speed correctly derived from? The legs.
Try having the ball higher in the stance with a slower approach. If the swing takes longer the legs have to go slower creating slower ball speed.

In college terms. You have to drink a beer in one mile (the swing or in this case swig). Do you drink it faster when driving (legs) 100 mph or at 30 mph? In both cases you have to finish at the 5,280th foot mark. Obviously you would drink slower when driving slower.

[J Anderson]

Why?

No teenage boy is going to want to throw slower until he understands that under certain conditions it will help him get more strikes. If the scoreboard shows the ball speed, their natural tendency will be to see how fast they can throw.

My apologies for ignoring teenage girls, but I didn't understand them when I was a teenage boy. I certainly don't understand them now.

I would guess your team ranges from newbies to fairly advanced. For all but the most advanced, consistency is far more important than adjusting speed. Targeting, footwork, timing, and focus are what most of the team should probably be working on. Wait for them to ask you about throwing slower. The fact that they try to muscle it back up shows they're not interested in throwing slower.

When they do ask, while holding the ball lower works, the higher level coaches are teach that speed comes from the legs more than the arm. They advise shortening the approach to slow down and standing farther back to speed up.

[Flyer41]

Thanks for the advice, the main reason I want to teach them adjusting ball speeds is that our home lanes have a fair amount of backend, but whenever we go out for a match to a place with heavier oil/ less backends they struggle and they don't quite get how to get a consistent reaction out of the ball. The team really only has one cranker, and the rest play straight up 10 for the most part and if they can't get the ball to finish at their normal speed they don't bowl well because they do not practice a slower ball speed enough during practice to do it consistently during a match