Canadian variant focuses on technique over strength
Five-pin bowling is a sport you may have already heard of, but maybe you never had a reason to play.
To say five-pin bowling lacks the physicality that most sports have would be to undermine the very strenuous quality that was meant to be showcased in 10-pin bowling. Ten-pin bowling has been around since ancient Egypt, but was only introduced in Canada in the 1880s.
After accommodating American standards and the complaints of those who said 10-pin bowling was just too strenuous, Thomas F. Ryan created what would be known as five-pin bowling. Ryan shaved the regulation pin down to about three-quarters its original size and replaced the clunky bowling balls with hand-sized rubber balls.
“Five-pin bowling isn’t a sport that requires as much strength as it does finesse and technique,” says first-year philosophy major and bowling enthuiast Natasha Daviau. “The balls are easy to carry around and anybody can use two hands to toss them down a lane. Even children bowl.”
According to the Canadian 5 Pin Bowlers’ Association’s (C5PBA) archives, the first blind bowlers’ league was introduced in western Canada in 1935. The C5PBA is the governing body that has overseen five-pin bowling since 1978.
Government statistics make this Canadian sport even more interesting, like in 1995 when more than 500,000 Canadians participated in five-pin bowling, 63 per cent of which were women.
“It’s definitely an activity I would suggest to somebody who is new to the sport,” says first-year ethics and society student and bowling newbie Carolyn Cook.
Cook explains there are two common techniques with avid and amateur five-pin bowlers. The first is very straightforward in that the ball is thrown down the lane with a projected path of a straight line. The key to this technique is making sure that the ball deviates roughly half a pin—no more—to the left or the right.
The second technique is slightly more demanding and perhaps transforms five-pin bowling into more of a sport than originally advertised. The ball is intentionally thrown toward the gutter, but with just enough spin that it re-centres just in time to hit the head pin. Although this technique seems counterproductive, it offers an alternative to bowlers who can’t deal with straight lines or are cursed by punching the head pin. Punching is a term that means knocking a single pin without hitting any other pins.
Five-pin bowling focuses on technique rather than the strength involved in 10-pin bowling.
“It doesn’t get much easier than a sport that was founded on the principle of making things easier,” says Daviau.
