FOR the first time in Namibia, bowling tournament was played on an outdoor artificial surface at the Windhoek Afrikaans Private School’s synthetic surface hockey field situated at the Wanderers sports fields in Windhoek.
The competition was organised by the Namibia Bowling Association (NBA).
Thirty one (31) entries were received, four of which were non-bowlers, of which players were drawn in pairs.
The scoring system was a little complicated so, where there were three players in a team, two played and one had to fill in the score sheet.
Six rinks (or lanes, as non-bowlers tend to call them) were demarcated so that all twelve teams could play and no-one had a bye at any time.
Great fun was had by all who participated but some of the comments were that the surface played very differently than grass.
Some bowlers said the bowls rolled faster in one direction and slower in the opposite direction.
Also, on one side of some rinks, the bowls played narrow and on the other side, the bowls played much wider.
The surface of the hockey field has joins which create channels. One comment was that, if your bowl landed in one of these channels it continued in the channel and did not curve properly the way it should. All in all it was very tricky, which made it very challenging.
The format of the competition was “strength versus strength”, namely, teams are drawn at random for the first round.
Thereafter, the two teams with the most points play each other, the third and fourth places play each other and so on.
After each round, the points were added to the teams’ existing points and the process continues so that after the designated rounds, the team with the most points is declared the winner.
After five rounds, the results were as follows:
First place went to Andre de Vries and Colin Peake, both from Eros Bowling Club, second place went to Corny Stamm (Tsumeb Bowling Club), Elna Esterhuizen (Eros) and Kieran Pretorius, who has never played bowls before and third position, was Horst Zimny (Windhoek Bowling Club and Colin de Beer (Eros).
Michael Wells, President of the NBA, said if the bowlers want to see more bowling played on the artificial turf then there is no reason to why not.
“This is was an historical event to play on an artificial turf, as you know that our bowlers are only used to play on grass. Who knows maybe in the near future we might just have our own artificial turf. Artificial turf is cheaper to maintained then grass,” Wells said.
