Lawn Bowling

Today we went out to North Sydney to experience Lawn Bowling.  At first it was raining pretty heavily, so we didn't think we would get to participate but luckily it ended up clearing up a little bit.  I haven't seen lawn bowling before, but I heard it was a little similar to bocce ball.

We were split into teams and were competing against each other for points.  It took a while for us to get used to the weighted bowls and how much they would curve when we tried to aim for the jack.  Some people picked it up rather quickly on my team and others had a much more difficult time with the aiming.  I didn't realize how much the weight of the bowl could affect the game and make it that much more difficult to do it well.   I also found that by changing how hard I threw the bowl by even just a little bit, it could completely change the distance and how much it curved by a lot.

After all of the teams played a few rounds, the points were tallied and we were split into a winner's bracket and a loser's bracket for the championship.  My team was in the loser's bracket, but we were all still pretty competitive and had a lot of fun.  I was really surprised at how fun lawn bowling was; at first, I didn't think it would be interesting, but it takes a lot of skill and practice to be good at it.  Most people tried out different throwing techniques, how far out we would aim to curve the bowl, and whether we wanted to aim left or right just to see what would happen.  Everyone that was at the facility seemed to really get into their teams and started cheering when someone placed a bowl close to the jack.  Lawn bowling seems like it is the perfect, relaxing team sport that anyone can play and enjoy.