Oak Bay team wins Greenslade

Fourteen Teams from Bowls South Island clubs participated in the 2021 Men’s Triples Tournament

OBLBC hosted the Greenslade Mens Triples tournament — the first since 2019 — on August 21 and 22, with 42 players representing most clubs in the Greater Victoria area. One player from the Richmond LBC also participated.

There were both highs and lows over the two days of exceptional bowling competition.  One low point was when Brent Merchant was posing as a flower when out of nowhere an enraged wasp bit off what Brent said was a good two pounds of flesh from his left arm. After crying uncontrollably with little sympathy from his teammates he continued but blamed the wasp each time one of his shots went in a direction not expected by his skip – the other Brent. (This news article was written by Brent Merchant at his insistence. Worried by such blatant exaggeration, the official recorders felt obliged to re-check all of the Team 9 scorecards to ensure that they were in agreement with those of their opponents. — Editor)

Our greens were in great shape thanks to John, our greenskeeper, who had held off watering the greens since Wednesday and cut the greens on both Friday and Saturday afternoon. This extra care did make the greens run faster than usual.

A host of club members came out to help make the tournament successful. Members marked the greens on Friday. Early on both days, folks helped to set-up the rinks and rolled the greens. Kitchen helpers came in waves to make coffee and tea and to keep the goodies flowing for both days. Bartenders made sure that participants could get a drink from the bar. Club members came as spectators to cheer on the three Oak Bay teams skipped by Mort Nelson, Jeff Machan, and Brent Jansen. (Foreign spectators were also allowed, provided that their cheers were muted.)

The coffee, tea, snacks, libations and the friendly reception by our members was wonderful and greatly appreciated – thanks to all of you. Our thanks also to Jill Foster and Anne Mathie, who were the official umpires for the tournament, and to Chris Slade who programmed all the registration and scoring processes. Beth Christopher provided the portrait gallery at the end of this report. She has chosen lots of action shots where players can check their form.

Harnam Grewal recognized for his 18 years as an umpire

David Mathie and Harnam Grewal

After lunch on the second day, Dave Mathie from the Juan de Fuca Club made a presentation to Harnam Grewal for his 18 years as an umpire.

Umpiring is a vital part of lawn bowling. If you play in the competitive games , you’ll understand how valuable they are to the sport; and Harnam has always done this with integrity, fairness and dignity. His work in this regard was well recognized by Dave’s presentation.

Well done Harnam and thank you for being such an excellent umpire.

Results of the 2021 Greenslade tournament

The draw was pre-set by team number, with every team playing seven other teams, but players did not know which team they were until skips drew their team number on arrival at the club on the first day.

The results of the Greenslade after two days of bowling seven 10-end games were as follows:

First Place: Brent Merchant (Vice), Brent Jansen (Skip), Mitch O’Brien (Lead) . All from OBLBC.

Second Place: Steve Foster (Vice, JdFLBC), Gordon Oikawa (Lead Richmond LBC), Absent David Mathie (Skip JdFLBC)

Third place: Peter Smith (Vice), Svend Klausen (Skip), David Gardner (Lead). All from Gordon Head LBC.

Detailed Results

Tournament Statistics

We published the results of each round in near real-time. Within minutes of receiving the last of the scorecards for each game, the results were on a club noticeboard and on our website. We know what happened in detail in each of the 49 games. Many individual match outcomes were crucial in deciding the final result. For example:

• No team won all of its games and no team lost all its games.
• There were three 7-point ends over the two days, two of them by Dennis Verge’s team. It might be more accurate to say one by Dennis’s team and the other by Brent Jansen who steered the jack towards seven enemy bowls lying in ambush and thus lost the game.
• There was one so-called perfect game where a team won all ten ends. (“Perfect” probably depends on whether you were a winner or a loser of that game.) The result of this game secured the bronze medal for Svend Klausen’s team, the defending champions from 2019, who were tied in game points with two other teams.
• On the way to the crucial final game, the silver medallist dropped only one game — to a team that didn’t win any other game.
• It all came down to one final game where one team had 15 points and the other 12.
• The tournament finished with two teams with 15 game points and three with 13 game points. Net Shots determined the final ranking for both first and third places.

If you want to trace the progress of your team, here are the rankings round by round: