Seattle Press on Line - Lawn Bowling Finds a Niche at Woodland Park

Lawn Bowling Finds a Niche at Woodland Park

By Brian Beaky

George Gilmour, a member of the Woodland Park Lawn Bowling Club.

Rand Coburn, foreground, shows his bowling style.

Jul 12, 2000 -- Rand Coburn is a bowler, defined in a classical sense. Coburn does not frequent any of the thousands of bowling alleys nationwide that have entertained families and provided teenagers smooth first dates for the past 50 years. Rather, Coburn prefers to bowl on a patch of grass just west of the Green Lake Amphitheater in upper Woodland Park, a spot where one will not hear the tremulous symphony of weighted balls rolling down greased wooden alleys, though the occasional splat of a ball sticking in the wet Seattle earth is not entirely uncommon.

Coburn is one of 70 members of the Woodland Park Lawn Bowling Club, which meets weekly to compete in a game that has passed from its Egyptian creators to the great kings of England, to near extinction, and now recently to a progressively younger following seeking a classical challenge in an increasingly diverse sports marketplace.

"The game itself is fascinating," the 32-year-old Coburn said. "It can be as competitive as you want it to be, or as social as you want it to be. As soon as I tried it, I knew I would love it. It was a perfect match for my personality, competitive, yet intellectually challenging. The combination of strategy and skill required is what drew me in."

Similar to Bocce and curling, the object of lawn bowling is to accumulate points by rolling boules (essentially oversized croquet balls) closer to a smaller, white ball--called the jack--than one's opponent. Several boules are rolled in each round, or "end," with the winner being the one with the highest score at the conclusion of a set number of ends.

While attendance at traditional bowling alleys has decreased during the past 20 years, according to a recent study by Sports Illustrated, lawn bowling has undergone a revival. Participation is on the increase at local clubs such as Woodland Park, where organizers have made a concerted effort to attract younger members in an effort to dispel the lingering perception that lawn bowling is a geriatric sport played by "old men in white pants."

In fact, Coburn pointed out, lawn bowling is one of few competitive sports in which age and sex make little difference in ability. Woodland Park's bowlers range in age from 30 to 90, with roughly a 2-1 male-female ratio. Last October, Coburn played against--and lost to--a man receiving oxygen from a tank he trailed along behind him. "When it was his turn to play, he'd walk down the green and turn off the tank, then turn it back on after his turn was done," Coburn explained. "That's the beauty of it, though, that young and old can compete on a level playing field."

On Friday, July 14, Coburn and other members of the club will provide free lessons to anyone interested in learning the game, part of their ongoing mission to increase lawn bowling's popularity in the United States to the levels of participation seen in Canada and Australia, two of the sport's most popular locales.

"In other countries, they have programs to educate and involve people in the sport at a young age, and we don't really have that here," Coburn says. "I guarantee you that once you play, you'll be hooked."

Interested readers can contact the Woodland Park Lawn Bowling Club at 782-1515 for more information on meeting and lesson times.

Brian Beaky is a student in the University of Washington School of Communications News Laboratory.

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