On Saturday afternoon Josh, Robyn, Chris & I headed over to Southtown Lanes in Bloomington to volunteer for the SOMN Bowling event. We were each assigned as a “Trouble shooter” and we weren’t sure what to expect. Unfortunately it turned out that we felt pretty worthless and were disappointed because we wanted to add value to the event.

Each set of lanes had two people (Lane Leaders I think they were called) assigned to make sure each athlete bowled when it was his or her turn. For the 48 lanes there were 7 trouble shooters and our job was to watch for a lane leader to raise their clipboard and if that happened to go see if we could help out. The 2 reasons they would need help were 1) A lane problem (ball stuck, pins on the lane) or 2) Scoring problem. Well…the 4 of us had never worked at a bowling alley so besides pushing the call button to tell someone from the bowling alley that something was stuck the first reason is ridiculous. There’s absolutely no reason I can see that they person leading the lane couldn’t have done that for themselves. The scoring problem is sort of the same to me. In order to change the score the bowlers had to stop so it could be adjusted and none of us were experts in bowling alley machine scoring so I’m not sure why the lane leaders couldn’t handle that part as well. Especially since there were 2 of them and at every lane I saw one of those people was standing back and basically just cheering. So…we actually ended up leaving early. I have been dealing with some sciatic nerve pains and my back was killing me so after 3 hours week took off. It’s unfortunate because an experience like that doesn’t make people want to come back.

It did seem as though the athletes were having a great time though, so I hope that it was a good experience for them! Each lane had people from different teams bowling together and everyone was cheering for the people they were bowling with which was fun to see.

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