How Women’s Bowling is Evolving: More Power, More Speed, More REV Rate and Why the ‘Like a Girl’ Mindset in Bowling Needs to Change

I have gained some recognition in our sport because of how I throw the ball. It’s quite strong and powerful. People like to describe my bowling style by saying that I throw the ball very much like a man.

Actually, since the early days, people have said I don’t bowl “like a girl.” What does it mean when someone says, “like a girl”? I don’t like that saying.

To me, it feels sort of derogatory, because I think what people mean is that “like a girl” means weak.

I’m not weak. I’m a strong female. I bowl like me. I bowl like a girl with strength and power.

I don’t like it when people state it in a way that assumes girls are automatically weaker. Or that if I’m more powerful, I’m playing “like a man.”

I bowl like me. To me, that difference in how I say it matters.

I get compared to men who bowl, because people don’t often associate power and strength with girls bowling. I don’t want people to continue to disassociate women or girls from the potential to bowl powerfully.

But girls do have that potential to be powerful.

For me, the way I bowl has always been “like a girl” because I am a girl and I’ve never seen any limits to how a girl can bowl.

I am thankful that, growing up in the sport in Poland, I didn’t have many traditional influences. It was such a new sport there, and I was part of the first generation of bowlers there. I could sort of define the sport for myself, with no limits. When I started bowling at six, it was at the country’s first bowling center. There wasn’t another bowling center before that one in 1999. There was no one to show me the way there.

So I just started creating it for myself—how I wanted to bowl. I set my own rules.

When I watched broadcasts, I believed I could do whatever I saw anyone doing; even if it was a man, I could learn how to do it myself as well. No one told me I couldn’t do something if it was a guy I was watching. The game that was most appealing was one that looked strong and powerful. That, for me, was something that I liked. I wanted to have a lot of rev rate, and I wanted the ball to hook.

Ever since the beginning, I aspired to be a girl with a powerful shot. I wanted to be a mixture of the powerful shots I was seeing men throw on TV, but as a girl, able to do that too.

The important point is that just because I didn’t see a woman delivering that power, I didn’t think that meant it wasn’t possible for women. The reality is, now I know there have been powerful women who paved the way (e.g., Michelle Feldman); however, I didn’t know about them because there weren’t many broadcasts of women playing on TV.

However, if you started with the sport in a country like the US, or anywhere else where bowling is more widely popular and publicized, that is a stigma that was put in a lot of women's hands. In most places, girls were being coached differently than the boys, based on that belief and stigma that girls are weaker and can only bowl a certain way: for example, straight angles, closed shoulders, and hips toward the target that was straight up in front of you.

Many times when I was young, I was asked who my bowling idol was. Or, who was the person that I was trying to model my game after? And this question has always given me the hardest time. I always had a hard time answering who my idol was. When I was young, I never had a female idol. I was too ignorant to learn about the history of bowling to appreciate the women who had been winning big tournaments. I was nearsighted and just looked at the visual, physical aspects of the game. And it just happened to be men bowling in the style I liked. Many times, I would say I admired Tommy Jones’s style because he has a high backswing, very high ball speed, high REV, and overall a very powerful shot. As I have grown older, I have started idolizing a lot of Hall of Famers whom I hadn’t known before, because I can see more than just the physical game and I have respect for their achievements and their mental toughness. These are the parts of the game I didn’t fully understand when I was a kid.

As you’re reading this, I’m sure you already know my style now. I'm one of the examples that show it is not true that women or girls cannot be strong. If you were to look at my REV rate numbers printed anonymously next to a man’s, you wouldn’t automatically know which one is which because my numbers and theirs would be close. You’d have no way of knowing who released which ball. Pins know no gender.

I was once told the story of the elephant and the rope. If you haven’t heard it, I’ll summarize it for you. Basically, adult elephants can be tethered to a pole with a small rope, and these powerful animals won’t attempt to break free. Why not? Because they believe they are not strong enough to break free. From the time they’re young, their trainers tether them to a pole and condition them to believe that they are not strong enough. At first, when they were young, they were not strong enough to break free, but as they grew, they gained strength. Yet, they don’t challenge the belief that was set when they were young. Their conditioning keeps them believing that they’re not strong enough to break free. In these situations, these powerful animals live with vast limitations that actually go against their nature. The truth is that they are so powerful. They just don’t know it. They’ve been tethered since being an infant, and now they only step away if someone untethers them.

It’s an incredible story because these adult elephants have more than enough power within them to break free from the rope’s limitations. And it's an analogy for what happens in so many other human situations. People place limits on themselves even when the truth is they are actually capable of so much more.

The situation with female bowling is similar. The idea that there are limits for how a female can bowl was simply imposed on females through society, conditioning us to believe that we’re weaker.

For years, women weren’t moving beyond the way they were trained. We were conditioned with the belief that we weren’t strong or powerful enough to bowl a different way. Please bear in mind: everything I say is through my own lenses and my personal experiences. Being coached in the early 2000s by certified coaches had shown me that there is a women's way and a men's way of bowling. One of the reasons I parted ways with my first personal coach was because he wasn't able to take my game to where it was going, nor where I wanted it to go. He wanted me to wear a glove, to be tall, to be straight; he wanted me to be someone I was not.

I would like to believe that I, along with other female bowlers in our era, are showing what is possible. We’re showing that being female doesn’t automatically set you up to have your game look a certain way. You can set your own game style, and it can be powerful if you want it to be. You can have power within you, and you can learn how to use it to fuel your game to be powerful too.

Sure, we’re built differently, and there are different things to think about when we are training…but we can train for all that. We have wider hips than men, so our timing points may be different sometimes. Some people are less flexible; some are more; some are double‑jointed in their elbows like me; and some are not. But as long as we’re aware of it, we can train for it. So I want to kill that stigma that women cannot do certain things.

I, along with some other girls who have powerful games now too, have started to kill that stigma that girls are weaker, and so is our bowling. My generation of female bowlers is showing what is achievable. We’re demonstrating female capabilities with more power, speed, and REV rate.

Now, compared to even a few years ago, there are more and more women with higher REV rates. There are even small girls already trying to REV the ball. They’re able to look around and see other females with a powerful game. Now girls have these examples of a powerful female game. It shows them that they have that as a style choice now. And don't get me wrong, this is not about me saying that having a high rev rate is the key to success—I’m not even saying that having a powerful game is the best way to be great; I'm just trying to make a point: if you want to, you can work for it because it is achievable, and creating rev rate is not as much about strength as it is about technique.

I bowl like a powerful girl. And stating it that way has been important to breaking barriers… I’m so excited to see powerful girl bowlers coming up in the sport. It’s becoming more normal to aspire to a powerful game. And that’s a great achievement for the sport.