How We Bowl
Some more about how we get our bowl on!
S3 Leagues are first and foremost FUN and SOCIAL leagues.
Our goal is to have a good time with friends and meet new people.
– All games start at 5:30 pm, so please arrive NO LATER than 5:15 pm. This will give you enough time to get shoes, grab a drink, find your lane and warm up. If you do happen to come late (please plan on coming early!), you can catch up on your frames ONLY if your team hasn’t completed the 5th frame, which is a standard bowling rule. If you come after this time, you’ve gotta wait til the next game.
– When you arrive, first grab a drink. Then go to the shoe guy and say “Hey shoe guy! I’m with S3, can I please have some shoes?” and he’ll give you shoes. Then head to your lane. Lane assignments are posted in the Schedules & Results section of our site. Our League Coordinator will also have a lane assignment list with em each night. Once you get to your lane, simply enter in your name. You do this for each roster player or sub in attendance.
– We bowl league style so that you go back and forth between the two lanes in your match up, making it a more social interaction between teams. Two bowlers should not walk up at the same time on lanes next to each other.
– You will be bowling in a match (2 games) against the team in the lane connected to yours. Doing league style makes it so that your teams will both end their games at the same time so you can figure out who won at the end of each game.
– Substitute players ARE allowed in this league. Your team may have as many people bowling on your lane each night as you have on your official roster. If you cannot make it one night, tell your team AS SOON AS YOU KNOW. Then you or your team can find a replacement. Subs must have bowled during the regular season at least once to qualify for bowling in the playoffs.
– This entire league is played using scratch pins to determine the winning team. What this means is that we are playing normal bowling with no tricks or bells and whistles. We’re doing it this way because when you get a good score and say “Yes! I got a 100!” you actually did. When joining as an individual or with friends, you tell us how good you are, and we use this to make all teams fairly evenly matched. We once tried using handicaps where you never knew who won the games til the day after we played, the math was insanely complicated, and no one really knew what the heck was going on. Doing it this way makes it simple. You show up, enter your name on the lane you’re bowling on, and bowl. Then figure out who won by which team did better. Sounds fun!
– To determine who wins each game you take the total score for your lane and divide it by the total number of people on your lane that bowled that game. For example, if 8 people show up to bowl on Team #1 and the total team score is 1200 for a game, you divide by 8 and Team #1’s average for that game is 150. Then say Team #2 has 7 bowlers and their team total score for the game was 1120. You divide that by 7 people being there and Team #2’s average for that game is 160. So Team #2 wins the game. You play the same team for two games each week and play a new team around your age range each week.
– Teams must have a minimum of 2 total bowlers to have a legal team for the night. You can bring subs in situations where many players cannot come, so you should never have less than 2! If you cannot find a substitute player, it’s not a problem at all because you are dividing the team total each game by the number of people bowling on the lane to determine your team average for that game. We do not have a fill-in list of players.
– There’s a huge parking lot next to and behind the building for those of you that drive. We recommend taking public transit. If you drive, please be safe, responsible adults and DO NOT drink and drive.
If you ever need ANYTHING AT ALL, can’t figure out how to use the computer score machine thingy, or if your pins get stuck or whatever, ask the bowling alley staff at the front counter and they will help you out. We will have a League Coordinator there, but our staff member of course does not work for the bowling alley. The guys at the front desk are the go-to guys for everything.
Playoffs
The regular season is the first 5 weeks of the season. Playoffs tourneys are the final week. For the way we run playoffs, teams are placed into independent 4-team divisions based on regular season rankings. Because these are totally social leagues, some players and teams won’t be as good at bowling as they are at simply hanging out and having fun meeting others. While we try to balance team skill levels, it’s not always a perfect science so this method of running playoffs allows similarly skilled teams to play each other in playoffs, which means any team can win a prize in the end! The winner of each division’s championship match the final week gets a team bowling party at our super awesome bowling alley!
One final thing
Some players will be freakishly awesome, some embarrassingly terrible. Whichever you are, come knowing that no one cares how good you are and that we’re all here simply to hang out and meet some cool people. This is the most rec league you’ll ever play in with how we run it, which is kind of what bowling is meant to be anyways, so make sure to be super social and don’t think too hard about winning games. After a few weeks it’ll just be you and your friends hitting the lanes to bowl and winning becomes an afterthought. Also remember that all teams of individuals are put together at random by age (and friend requests). So while your team is your team for the season, make sure to meet others too! That’s the whole point of S3 Leagues!