Following a deliberate practice session the brain must stay active, creating a game plan. I had 21 hours to come up with my plan for attacking the pattern. This had to include the knowledge from other players, characteristics of the center, how I expected the pattern to play, who I was following, and what A squad did.
Based on the observations of other lefties (we DO work together…we have to) and my own perception, it seemed that the pattern would likely play somewhere between 3 and 8 down lane with the lay down being somewhere around 3 to 10.
I would not encounter another lefty until game 4, and then another starting with game 6. The first lefty was going to throw surface to my left (as always) and the other was going to throw shiny stuff to my right (as always). The key to knowing this is always to enable those bowlers to make the pattern easier, not harder. For the pair that the straight lefty broke down, I would throw a faster response ball and move in just a bit, banking it off of his burn. Once I encountered both the most important factor was never crossing their paths twice. My hope was to be able to use the path of shiny equipment to create a “shim” and the dull to create a tiny bump spot. Again, I would likely use a ball with a faster response time than I did on the fresh.
On Saturday morning the first squad was interesting, to say the least. Unlike the righties, who have to watch everyone, I only watch a handful of players. This particular morning, Ryan Ciminelli and Rhino Page were the only left handed players I needed to watch.
Rhino had a phenomenal morning, leading qualifying. However, Rhino has a bag of tricks that no other lefties possess. On Saturday, Rhino played between the 4 board and 9 board all day. He used a pearl resin ball with an incredibly weak layout, spinning the ball and often lofting it when encountering the lay down of the right handed players. Essentially, Rhino created a shim with his release and the layout of the ball. While he could not really miss toward the gutter, he could miss right a great deal.
On the other end of the spectrum, Mr. Ciminelli had a very difficult day. While Ryan is undoubtedly one of the best left handed bowlers in the world, we all struggle from time to time. Essentially, Ryan had a great deal of difficulty getting the ball to read the pattern. The stronger equipment would read the pattern way too early and weaker equipment would not move until it fell off of the back of the deck.
Given these observations, I decided to take only Raptors and Sigma Tours to the lanes for my squad. On the fresh the plan was to use strong, slow response equipment and transition to faster response balls. Furthermore, while I had thought that outside the first arrow would be ideal, based on Rhino’s performance I decided to first look between the first and second arrows. Basically, I knew that I could not create his hold with spin, so I needed to create it with speed and angle through the front of the lane.
Of course, all of these observations relied upon the pattern being consistent and the bowler executing good shots.
No comments:
Post a Comment