Plan Your Ball Path With Pin Placement

* I have noticed many pros using various drilling positions on their balls, and Marshall Holman also makes reference to the pin placement on the ball. I have three questions: (1) What is the pin on the ball? (2) How do the pros go about selecting the preferred drilling position? And (3) how do they get the balls drilled on tour?

The pin is a colored dot on the ball that signifies the position of the top of the core in the ball. With today's high-tech bowling balls, the ball driller must know where the core is in the ball.

When a ball is built, the core--anchored by a small rod--is suspended in a mold, and the cover stock is poured into the mold. When the cover material hardens and the ball is removed from the mold, the rod that was holding the core of the ball in the mold is removed. Now there is a hole in the ball that has to be filled, and it is filled with plug material, which on the surface on the ball looks like a dot.

All the way up to the early '90s, Columbia was the only company that colored those plugs. Using dots to refer to the makeup of the ball started with Columbia's Yellow Dot in the mid-`70s. Columbia was making a hard plastic ball with a white dot in the middle of the label. After making the Yellow Dot, everyone started to refer to Columbia's balls by the color of the dot.

As the cores of the modern-day resin urethane balls became so strong, and as our understanding of the core's influence on the motion of the ball advanced, it became important for the ball manufacturers to color the plug so we could see what we were dealing with. Today there is no high-performance ball that doesn't identify where the core is and how far it is from the center of gravity, or "cg." The cg is marked by a small punch mark on the surface of the ball. The position of the cg relative to the pin determines how we drill the ball for the reaction we're trying to get.

You may have noticed that very few high-performance ball labels are located near the pin and the cg. They're all away from the drilling area, so the ball driller can clearly see the cg and the pin. Only the plastic balls and the lower-priced resin and urethanes still put the label over the cg --these are the plastic and urethane balls with a pancake-style weight block. As a matter of fact, Columbia is the only company that has the pin and cg in the same spot on their plastic balls. Most of the companies build their cheap balls with no regard to where the pin is, and they color-coordinate the plug to the ball. But they still mark where the cg is by putting the label above it.

The pros pick out their preferred drillings based on what they feel will work for them. It takes knowledge of bowling ball construction --core, cover stock, and how they influence each other--and axis coordinates to help decide the drillings.

If two bowlers with equal talent are bowling equally well, the player with the better ball reaction will always win. The pros look at the lane condition and the ball reaction they're getting, and if they're not getting a good reaction they start thinking about what piece of equipment and drilling configuration will help them get the reaction they need to help maximize their performance.

Getting the right ball reaction through the use of equipment is part of the game today. It's critical to understand ball reaction to help you play well, but you have to be honest with yourself and not blame bad bowling for a problem caused by using the wrong ball. The best can survive without the best piece of equipment in their hands because they know enough to adjust their game to stay in the hunt until they can "match up." Matching up is having the right ball, the right speed and rotation on the ball, and playing the right area on the lane. And staying matched up requires making the right adjustments as the lanes change.

What the pros look for is the right type of ball movement for the condition they're playing on. For example, if you're bowling right after the lanes are stripped and oiled, you'll have a lot of front-end skid and strong back ends--the ball will automatically slide down the lane and finish hard without a lot of effort from the ball or the bowler. On this condition, you need to have the ball set up to have a controlled movement. You don't need a "skid long, flip hard" type of drilling and surface.

On the other side of the coin, late in the day after a lot of bowling, the heads will be hooking early and the back ends will be tight because of carrydown. The shot will have moved deep, so you'll need a ball that goes long and finishes hard. And during the day you could encounter many different ball reactions between those two extremes.

The ball companies maintain staffs of players on both pro tours, and they also have ball reps out on the tour with the players. The ball rep's job is to watch the ball reaction as the players use his company's balls; if a player requests assistance from the ball rep, he'll watch the player and make some recommendations about equipment to use. The ball rep acts as a consultant and sometimes as a coach.