these Open Championship Clubs choose to relief grind - Pitchcare

Summer Sports - Bowls
Expectations are running
high that the 2014
Commonwealth Games
will mark the rebirth of
lawn bowls in Scotland.
All the signs are
favourable that it will,
reports Tom James
The five-year build-up to London
2012 has ensured that the
Olympic Park, and the venues
within it, are ready and waiting for
the Games to commence. Not so
surprising, then, to be looking ahead to
2014 and another spectacle of elite sport
- the Commonwealth Games.
Even as we anticipate the afterglow of
Team GB’s medal success, planning for
the second biggest athletics event in the
world has already sprung out of the
starting blocks, as Glasgow prepares for
the show to hit town, some twenty-six
years after Scotland last played host in
1986.
The Olympics may be the career high
for elite competitors but, for those
involved in fine turf sports, the
Commonwealth Games offers a showcase
for a clutch of pursuits that Britain often
excels at, away from track and field.
Bowls is one such sport. Often
72 PC FEBRUARY/MARCH 2012
READY to take
on the WORLD
dominated by the British nations, it is in
crisis at grassroots level. Falling member
numbers, a generation of youth
disinterested in its seemingly low
adrenalin profile, and dearth of
investment, all contribute to what the
game’s administrators admit is a deeply
worrying state of affairs.
Glasgow offers the perfect opportunity
for bowls to assume centre stage before a
global audience, and the game’s
governing body will be well into its fiveyear
strategy for transforming the
fortunes of a sport that Scotland expects
its national players to deliver when it
matters.
Still more than two years away from
the big event, nothing less than a total
reconstruction of the focus for the
bowling competition is already complete
and prepared for practice play.
The setting is stunning. Kelvingrove
and its six lawn bowls greens lie in the
Artists impression of the
Commonwealth 2014 event
lee of some of Glasgow’s grandest and
most beautiful buildings. This is no ultra
chic architectural statement for 21st
century sporting provision, but an
example of sustainability many perhaps
intended, in that the planners have
preserved the very best of what was there
- and improved on it for the modern
game.
It’s a strategy that looks set for success.
Glasgow City Council’s decision to
redevelop the existing Kelvingrove Lawn
Bowls Centre, and invest in making it
truly world class, has already drawn
praise from World Bowls, the sport’s
governing body, when they visited the
centre last autumn.
The development comes at a time
when Bowls Scotland is setting out new
long-term goals to move the sport on
and to help bolster member numbers
nationally. The opportunity to stage the
Commonwealth Games offers the newly