TEAM EVENT IN THE LVT

We made our way out to Granada Bowl in Livermore on Saturday afternoon to bowl in the 48th annual Livermore Valley Tournament (LVT). We arrived early to take care of our paperwork and get ourselves prepared to bowl. We have yet to submit our entries in the singles and doubles part of the tournament. We were informed that we can do this at a later date. We were given the squad times to assist us in our decisions.

Gene's Pro Shop and the west side entry

We were assigned to lane 7 and it didn't take us long to get set up. With some time to spare, we stepped into Gene's Pro Shop for a few supplies. Each of us entered in Gene's bowling ball raffle. The drawing will be in February and the winner gets the bowling ball of his/her choice plus, fitting, drilling, etc., at no cost beyond the price of the raffle ticket(s).

The control desk at Granada Bowl

The tournament was extremely well organized. We were able to check in without any waiting or difficulties. This is a credit to Tom Crane, the gentleman who runs the tournament. There was also a patient, helpful lady who handled our entry and I'm drawing a blank on her name at the moment. Everything went smooth as silk except for two things and one of them couldn't be helped.

First, we didn't get nearly enough warm-up time. I usually need about ten to twelve shots before I feel loose and ready to go. That includes a couple of shots each at the seven and ten pins. I had only six warm-up shots before we got underway and that's not enough. With ten people bowling per pair, I think they need to allow us a little more time to practice. The second thing was a scoreboard malfunction that caused us to sit for about ten minutes and go cold. There isn't anything the tournament director could do about that one. Call it a bit of bad luck.

Lanes at the east end of Granada Bowl

Despite the inconveniences, all of us bowled well. Olivia, Peter, and I each had a game we'd like to throw out but we shot over our averages for the three game series. The Coach and Sharon shot over their averages in all three games. In order to beat the sum of our individual averages, we had to shoot a team scratch series of 2,367 and we shot 2597. We beat it by 230 pins which isn't bad at all.




LVT     BOOK BOOK  01  02  03  SER  AVG  HDCP HDCP  PINS
         AVG  SER                              SER  >AVG
Sharon  162  486 206 174 176  556 185.3  156  712    70
Olivia  136  408 179 148 117  444 148.0  226  670    36
Peter  153  459 149 225 138  512 170.7  180  692    53
Mark  184  552 156 199 240  595 198.3   97  692    43
Gary  154  462 156 168 166  490 163.3  178  668    28
Total  789 2367 846 914 837 2597 173.1  839 3436   230

The BOOK SERIES column shows the three-game series total each of us needed to bowl to hit our averages. The PINS > AVG shows how many pins we bowled above our averages. As you can see, all of us were over. I call that a pretty fair day.

Thanks to everyone for making this an enjoyable experience. And a special thanks to Peter for joining us and making our entry in the tournament possible.

The LVT wasn't the only action we had going this day. We decided that once we finished, we would head over to Dublin for some dinner and then bowl in the Pot 'O' Gold event at Earl Anthony's Dublin Bowl.