About The Good Bowler

Lawn bowls coaching online is a club PDF from 2009, a forum argument from 2011, or a video of someone's uncle filmed from too far away. None of it tells you what to change before Saturday.

That's the gap this site exists to fill.

Who writes it

I'm Vance Fitzgerald. I build software on the Sunshine Coast, and I built Lawn Bowls Coach AI — an app that watches a clip of your delivery and tells you what's going wrong with it.

Let me be straight with you about where that leaves me, because this sport has a low tolerance for people talking above their station.

I'm not going to claim a cabinet full of pennant flags. If you want someone who has skipped a side to a state title, that isn't me, and you should be suspicious of any website that opens by telling you how good its author is at bowls.

What I do have is this: building an app that analyses a delivery frame by frame means spending an unreasonable amount of time on the mechanics. Why the same fault produces a narrow bowl on one hand and not the other. What actually changes when a green speeds up two seconds. Which faults are worth chasing and which are cosmetic. That work is the reason this blog exists, and it's the only authority I'm claiming.

The standard

Everything here has to pass three tests before it goes up:

1. Is it true? Green speed is defined, not guessed at. Distances are the real distances. Where the received wisdom of the clubhouse disagrees with what's actually measurable, I'll say so and show the working.
2. Is it actionable? One fault, one cause, one drill. If you can't try it at your next roll-up, it doesn't belong here.
3. Would a good coach wince? Plenty of bowls advice online is confidently wrong. The test isn't whether it sounds authoritative — it's whether someone who has coached for thirty years would recognise it.

What this site won't do

It won't pretend there's one correct delivery. People win pennants standing almost upright and people win from a full crouch. What matters is whether yours repeats.

It won't review gear that hasn't been used. See the gear page for exactly what that means in practice.

It won't pad. If a thing takes four hundred words to explain, it gets four hundred words.

Tell me when I'm wrong

I mean this. Bowls carries a lot of inherited advice, and some of it doesn't survive contact with a stopwatch — but some of what I write won't survive contact with someone who has been on the green since 1978 either.

If something here is wrong, reply to any newsletter email and tell me. Corrections get made in the post itself, not buried in a comment.