Bowling News
I am pleased to reproduce this viewpoint from Alan Hobson as his personal take on the present problem with bowling and some suggestions on how things may need to change to encourage the survival of our sport
A Future for Bowls?
A personal view from Alan Hobson
Bowls is presently a very underpriced sport. Many bowlers still expect to pay a club subscription of somewhere between £20 and £30 and bowl in several teams and play on the club green whenever they like for six months between the start of April and the end of September. The days when this was possible have gone. I am a member of two clubs and paid about £60 for my bowling subs. In addition the two clubs have a match fee of £1:50p and I played 75 matches last summer season. All told I paid in the order of £160 last season. To put this into perspective the whole of my bowls season cost me not much more than it would have done to attend one England international rugby match (had I wishes to do so!).
Bill Blackburn recently had an interesting story on HuddWeb about playing in a Yorkshire Cup match in the 1960s when there had been a £1 bet. He lost the game and paid the bet but his opponent then bought him a drink. If my memory serves me correctly in the 1960s you would have been able to buy in the order of ten pints for £1 so that Bill was playing for somewhere in the order of the equivalent of £40 to £50 today.
Bowls is presently underpriced because most bowling clubs are linked to social clubs of one sort or another. They had a golden age after the Second World War up to the 1980s when the clubs had a “turn” on Saturday evenings and they made lots of money and were able in effect to subsidise the bowls section and other sports sections such as the club football team. Those days have gone but the bowling green remains.
The cost of maintaining a bowling green these days will obviously vary from club to club and be partly dependent on the number of volunteers coming forward but, based on the two clubs that I bowl for, I would guesstimate that it would be in the order of £3000 per year. This means that a club that is charging £30 per year is going to need in the order of 100 members just to cover the cost of the green. There are lots of additional charges such as insurance, league fees and utilities to cover as well.
The BCGBA has come forward with a development plan to try and get more people to bowl. As we know they are charging clubs £1 per registered bowler to help finance this. Something that has met with opposition from those bowlers who still think an annual subscription of £20 is a lot to pay! I hope that this succeeds but I am doubtful that it will. It has a number of factors working against it.
The first of these is demographic. Bowlers in their sixties and seventies today were born at a time (1950s and 60s) when birth rates were high. In subsequent generations birth rates have been lower. This is why we have an ageing population – the younger people are just not there.
A second factor is economic. At the same time as there are fewer older people coming through, the government are raising the retirement age and so people are working rather than playing bowls. Hence the need to have to lower the age requirement for Vets bowling and the increasing number of leagues that have mixed sex teams.
A third factor is social. There are many more things to do these days than stand around a green on a wet and cold day. Linked to this is an increasing tendency for grandparents to want, or be expected, to look after grandchildren and so not be available to play bowls.
So a scenario of rising costs and a declining membership unwilling to pay those costs provides a dismal picture if bowls attempts to continue as it has. I do think there is an alternative. This is based around two factors.
The first of these is to recognise that there is going to be a decline in the number of greens as some clubs find themselves unable to continue and for those clubs to be prepared to rent time on other greens to play their matches. Some clubs are still doing well and may find it beneficial to rent out their green to other clubs.
The second factor is to look at the Winter League model of several teams playing each other at the same venue each week and to apply this to the summer, ie a winter type league played in the summer. The end result of these two factors would be a decline in the number of greens but greater utilisation of those greens and there would be some clubs, probably a majority of them, who did not have a green at all but were able to continue playing by renting other greens.
Not a lot to disagree with. I certainly agree that bowling is a cheap sport as many bowlers think subs of £40 - £50 are expensive. The biggest failure is to attract young people. The best bet may be to get grandparents to bring their grandchildren to get them started. I also think that young people in their late teens have other distractions. Some go to university and never return to bowling. We are seeing the same with football as fewer young people continue playing into their 20’s. The number of local open age teams have reduced enormously. Yet junior football is thriving.
The future of bowls must rest with attracting young people bowlers as we will always attract people…