D. Mark Crown
Bill Smedley loves five-pin bowling and is looking forward to competing in the event when Kamloops hosts the B.C. Seniors Games in 2013.
“It is good exercise and you get to meet people,” he says. “It’s fairly cheap…you can rent shoes at the lanes and you really don’t need anything else.”
Smedley encourages seniors who would like to get involved in five-pin bowling to go to any of the bowling centers in Kamloops and find a team to bowl with. These teams can then enter the Zone 8 tournament and compete to qualify for a place in the B.C. Seniors Games.
Each zone in B.C. sends two teams to the five-pin bowling event, an “A” division team and a “B” division team. The teams can be made up of both male and female seniors, and the event takes place over a four-day period.
“It is a round robin so you play 11 games,” Smedley says. “It’s about an hour or hour and fifteen minutes per game.”
Medals are awarded to the top three teams in each division based on the most pins knocked down over the team average in the 11 game round robin. Which means that while teams are competing against each other, they are also bowling against themselves, trying to do better than their average score.
There are also individual awards given out at the event for the highest male and female scores overall and highest male and female pins over their average in each division.
Even if a team doesn’t do particularly well in the event, individual players can still win medals if they bowl good scores throughout.
For more information about bowling at the B.C. Seniors Games contact Bill Smedley at 250-376-0573 or visit the B.C. Seniors Games website www.bcseniorsgames.org.