By Don Urquhart, Times Chronicle
The Osoyoos Lawn Bowling Club (OLBC) celebrated National Bowls Day on Saturday (June 1) with an open house giving people a chance to throw some bowls, have some refreshments and learn about this unique sport.
Paul Dube, President of the Osoyoos Club said this year is off to a slow start because “the winter was just brutal”. The cold temperatures wreaked havoc on the greens and forced the club to cancel its first annual 2024 Triples Tournament that had been scheduled for mid-June.
Damaged lawn bowling green from the harsh weather last January. Osoyoos Lawn Bowling Club photo.
And like many in the hard-hit wine industry who are replanting wines with hardier varieties, so too the OLBC which is looking at switching up its grass to something a bit hardier. “It’s Osoyoos, it isn’t supposed to do this but it does happen,” he says speaking about the harsh January cold spell.
Last year the club nearly doubled its membership to nearly 40 bowlers, in part because a number of the members are also members of the golf club and that helped them spread the word. “I fully expect us to add another dozen or so people, and we will probably lose five or six people who change their minds or people are older and stop playing.”
Dube says many people are fascinated by the sport and in the summer on volleyball nights at Gyro “there’s so many people hanging over the fence watching.” But the typical refrain he hears is “oh that’s something I’m going to do when I’m older!”
It is a sport that is easy on aging bodies with really just a requirement to be able to bend at the knees he says. But while it may not be physically demanding, it can be “ultra-competitive” he says noting when he was living in the lower mainland there would be some members of his local club that would be out practicing every single day in preparation for tournaments.
At the OLBC the big days are Music in the Park nights when 20-30 members will show up for some bowling, BBQ put on by the senior’s centre upstairs and of course the music. The OLBC leases the downstairs space from the Osoyoos Seniors’ Centre Association.
“We’ve got a nice space that’s ours, we have a kitchen, we do potlucks and we do a lot of social activities through the course of the summer,” Dube says.
“There’s probably 8-12 of us who travel to compete in other tournaments,” he says. While there are 22 clubs in the lower mainland, in the Okanagan the closest club is in Penticton. The majority of the bowling at the Osoyoos club is just about putting teams together in order to have a good game for an hour and half, have a good time and then sit down and have nice night,” he adds.
Scheduled bowling takes place on Mondays and Thursdays at 9 a.m. and then there is a men’s night, a women’s night and a mixed night.
Membership is $150 annually for as much bowling as a person wishes. A lockbox is on site which gives all members access to the equipment enabling them to come down and practice anytime they like.
For more information email [email protected] or visit Osoyooslawnbowling.ca.
