Bowls' Big Weekend: From ages 12 to 90, how bowls is transforming to attract a new crowd

More than 800 clubs across England are taking part in Bowls’ Big Weekend which began last night and stretches right the way through Bank Holiday Monday, with 24 of the 60 affiliated clubs in Yorkshire taking part.

It might not be a sport solely for old men, as Lesley will go on to explain, but that is the perception and one that bowls is keen to break as it fights for participants with every other sport still emerging from the wreckage of a membership-damaging pandemic.

There are plenty of old men playing it - why turn your nose up at your best customer? - but as Bowls’ Big Weekend has shown in recent incarnations, it is a sport that the whole family can enjoy.

“I would say our youngest member is 12, I think,” says Lesley, as she quickly runs her mind over the 2,200 affiliated members playing bowls in Yorkshire.

“We don’t have a lot of youngsters, there are more lads than lasses.

“We find it a struggle to get girls involved. We have a few playing in leagues but they’re not really interested in developing more and following on.

“Some of that is shyness, but it’s also because we’re a big county and there’s a lot of travelling to do.

“And then at the other end of the age range, our oldest member is 90, but my grandfather was still bowling at 96. So it’s a wide age group.

“There’s a lot of people with learning disabilities who are quite disabled but they still bowl and can do so at a very high level.

“For us bowls is a sport for everybody.”

The concept of Bowls’ Big Weekend is obvious, and so far has proven to be a winner.

Clubs pick a day to open up their rinks to newcomers and beginners.

At Black Swan Bowls Club in Harrogate - where proximity to a couple of pubs has proven a good recruitment tool in the past - Sunday is the day to go down.

Dave Rowson, Black Swan’s secretary, explains: “If they’re complete beginners we’ll give them some introductory coaching on bowls, teach them how to deliver a wood, how to gauge the distance they are sending it, and then start to introduce them to some of the basic principles like the fact it’s got a bias in the jack, what happens on different bits of the green etc.”

Black Swan has 40 members playing competitively and good number playing socially.

But the key for them is recruiting all year round, not just on special occasions.

“Days like these are just one of the ways we can survive by introducing new people to the sport,” says Rowson.

“We always jump on the Bowls Big Weekend because you get quite a lot of national publicity, but to be honest we don’t get much more than we would with our local advertising through social media.

“So we’ve been running quite a few afternoon and teatime sessions since the beginning of the season. We’ve done quite well this year, we’ve got a social bowling Wednesday and there was half-a-dozen newbies down there this week.”

Retention of members when they are dying out, as blunt as that sounds, is difficult.

Throw in the Covid pandemic, and bowls was tested as much as any sport.

Lesley explains: “There’s fewer numbers now than 10 years ago but we’re getting them back up to pre-pandemic levels, which we’re actually quite proud of in a lot of ways because the pandemic did hit us badly.

“A lot of people didn’t want to come back to bowling. With the pandemic, a lot of people stopped bowling indoors and because they stopped bowling indoors they then found other things to do and didn’t come back.

“So by keeping those numbers fairly level, which might not be brilliant, we think it’s something to be proud of.”

As well as the success of initiatives like Bowls’ Big Weekend, how have they managed it?

A collective, and front-foot approach has been key, says Lesley.

“We just work hard,” she says, matter-of-factly. “In Yorkshire we go out to clubs that are unaffiliated, tell them the benefits of being affiliated to Bowls England, and not just at a national level, but also the Yorkshire Bowling Association because we give clubs benefits on top of what BE offer.

“A lot of it comes through families where grandma and grandad bowl, and then the kids bowl, and then the grandkids bowl.

“We have made the game a lot more colourful and a lot less strict with things like uniforms and we do have several formats of the game now.

“If you’re a traditionalist you can be on the green for three and a half hours, no problem, but you can also go to a bowls bash and just bowl for an hour.

“We try to bring the fun into it, and we have found through the Bowls’ Big Weekend that because the sessions are fun, that once people get on the green and realise that playing bowls is not an old man’s sport, and it’s actually quite difficult to do, and they get hooked.”

Having a big shop window helps. There is no national club league, just county representative leagues, but international bowls, particularly on the Commonwealth Games stage, is huge for the sport.

Acutely aware of the need to change with the times, the lawn bowls event at next summer’s drastically truncated Commonwealth Games in Glasgow will be held indoors for the first time, and features a shorter and snappier format.

Jon Cockcroft, the chief executive of Bowls England, said: “From a broadcast perspective, from the advent of Sky TV and the like, some sports were winners and some were losers, and I think bowls has probably been slower than others in recognising the need to modify to become more TV-friendly.

“The bowls at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow will see shorter games, indoor, with more jeopardy, and I think we will see that same level of excitement that is being captured in other sports with shorter forms, like Twenty20 cricket.

“The sport has been in generational decline since Covid but we are starting to grow again, to reduce the average age of our player base. What we are fundamentally doing is taking our sport on a fairly transformative journey.

“We are trying to change perceptions by presenting our sport in a more modern light, and we have got some incredibly talented youngsters coming through. We have got our own versions of Luke Littlers who ultimately aspire to play in the Commonwealth Games with the senior team.”

To get involved at your local club this weekend, visit https://www.bowlsbigweekend.com/find-a-club/

Additional reporting: Mark Staniforth, PA