Even a benign sport like Bowling has an officiating controversy. One would think that in bowling all you have to worry about is knocking down the most pins, add up the scores and you have the winner. Whoa on there cowboy, there is much more to the USBC National Tournanment than that. In order spice things up a bit, there are brackets for each competitive squad. Each bowler has the option of getting in on the brackets at various dollar levels. This gives the players something to shoot for right then. The tournament lasts for about three months, so you will not really know where you stand until all the games have been played. With brackets, the competition is fierce and you know instantly whether you win or lose. This comes from the practice during league play of playing cards or even brackets every week. A tournament within a tournament if you will. It really adds a lot of fun to the game. Here is where the controversy comes in. March 20 ,2011, the squad competing in Reno experienced a power outage on half of the lanes in use. It lasted for 1 hour and 17 minutes and was caused by maintenance on lanes that were not being used. A technician forgot to restore the memory chips to the affected lanes and on power up, lanes 39-56 went down. It happened after 2 of the 3 games in that session were completed. At this point the USBC Manager on Duty, (MOD) allowed those bowlers who wanted refunds to opt out of the brackets and those who did not want refunds to continue. When the power was restored, each bowler was allowed two shots on the lanes as practice, as is USBC policy and the third game was completed. This was seen as unfair because if you were doing well you opted to stay in and if not, you took your refund. Further, there was not enough money on hand to accomodate all those who opted out of the brackets. Obtaining the necessary cash took even more time. For those who stayed in, the prizes were lower than they would have been. In all fairness to the MOD, she probably did what she thought was right but the tournamnet director was not in the building and there was no consultation. The MOD just made the call and that was that. I applaud the MOD for having the backbone to make a tough call but sadly, it was the wrong call. In retrospect all money should have been refunded or none. Another option would have been to call the bracket complete after the second game. Another alternative would have been to have the bowlers declare before the re-start that you accepted the bracket results or that you would take a tie in all brackets you advanced and split first and second place money. I really do not know which option should have been used but it is obvious there were other fairer alternatives. Bowlers need to have good experiences when going to the national tournanment and in this case, those affected by the outage did not. Who would have thought that even a mundane sport like Bowling would have this kind of mess? Anytime money is involved, things usually get interesting. That is part of the fun!!!
