DUMBO, our bowling league here in Da Nang, Vietnam, has been around for nearly 4 years. We started out as just 3 friends that went bowling every Thursday and it has grown to the point where the owners of the lanes reserve the entire bowling alley for us every week for as long as we need to use it. I do feel a little bit bad when Vietnamese people are turned away when we are there, but I also enjoy the fact that the management recognizes that we are "regulars" and that we would appreciate not being disturbed in our process while we are there. We do routinely bring 20-30 people there every week so I suppose we kind of deserve it even though the price per person is seriously small when compared to what people would expect to pay in Europe and America.
we get a pretty sizeable crowd every week
Things were getting a bit stale with the awards and also getting even more stale that the same people seemed to win the awards week after week, so we mixed up the league a bit to encourage people to participate and strive for the awards even if they are not the stronger bowlers in the league.
Our awards are plentiful and include 2 championship belts, 2 high score medals, a tag team medal, an award for getting three strikes in a row called the "gobbler," and also one other award for anyone that achieves a score of 158, which was the highest score that one of our founders had before he unfortunately passed away late last year.
These awards were generally held by the same people every week and one of the belts, the women's championship, tended to just bounce back and forth between the same two good women bowlers every week. We have a mostly male audience that attends so recently we decided to completely scrap the women's division and instead change things to be a "Premiere League" and a "2nd division league."
There are only 8 people that can possibly be in the premiere league and just like football in leagues around the world, whoever has the lowest high score of the two games they are allotted, gets relegated every week. In the 2nd division there is a championship every week and whoever wins that gets promoted to the premiere league. It is not possible to win the 2nd division championship 2 weeks in a row because by winning it once, you are immediately promoted to the top tier.
This introduces complications when people don't turn up and this can be problematic because of the fact that many of our members have "real jobs" and can't always make it to the bowling alley on a Thursday at 11AM, which is understandable to those of us that have normal employment. Some of our true heroes have worked it out so that they get all of Thursday off, or at least half of the day off. That's how important things are for a lot of us.
I have personally never missed a week since we started this league in November of 2020 and there is one other person that can claim the same thing. We actually build our visa runs and various obligations in our real life around Thursdays and at least for me, Thursday is one of the only times of the week that I actually know what day of the week it is since weekends are meaningless to my work schedule. For me, every day is Monday and every day is Saturday.
There have been a few changes about how the league operates and of course anyone out there is more than welcome to replicate this and use it themselves.
- Due to lack of female participation the championship belt has been eliminated for women. There is now just one belt to rule them all and a man or a woman is eligible to compete for this every week.
- The championship is determined weekly by taking the top 4 scores from people in the Premiere league and spinning a wheel to see who will face the current champion. It is not allowed for the same person to challenge for the belt 2 weeks in a row. If you lose in the championship match, you have to return to being a common bowler for a week.
- The 2nd division consists of everyone else in the league. People who are attending for the first time are not eligible to compete for the 2nd division belt.
- The competitors for the 2nd division belt is determined by the the 4 highest scores of that week. These 4 names are put into a randomizer app and 2 names are selected for the championship of the 2nd division. Whoever wins this game which is determined by the total score of 3 games, is automatically promoted to the Premiere league.
- Each week one person is relegated or moved down from the Premiere League to the 2nd division. This is determined by whoever has the lowest high score (each person gets their highest score of 2 games submitted)
- If one or more people in the Premiere League fail to turn up one week, they are automatically relegated - we may end up circling back to this because it doesn't exactly instill fear in the people in the PL the way we had hoped when people don't turn up to play
- The high score medals used to be the highest score of the entire year. This got boring really fast when two people, one of them was me, got a score that is very unlikely to be beaten by anyone. Therefore we have changed this medal to be the highest score of the month and it resets the first Thursday of each month. Don't get too excited if you win this award because everyone knows who actually has the highest score of the year :)
- There is a women's and men's highest score of the month. This is the only gender-specific award that DUMBO will have henceforth
- The "gobbler" can change hands to anyone multiple times per day and it is achieved by bowling 3 strikes in a row. This award has changed hands 4 times per day in the past two weeks and many people consider it to be the "best" award that we have because of this.
There's Nadi posing with a miniature version of the gobbler, she's actually not very fond of the sound it makes
I realize that the new rules outlined above can be a bit confusing to anyone unfamiliar with how we operate but just know that as a member of DUMBO, you don't really need to worry your pretty little head about it. Myself and 2 other members of the "admin" handle all of this and you just have to take our word for it when it is announced at the after party each week.
If you live in Da Nang and are free on Thursdays at 11AM I strongly encourage you to come and join us. It is a lot of fun and nobody actually cares if you are a good bowler or not. Our best bowlers average about 150 points per game and roughly half of our pack doesn't even manage to break 100 per game. So if you are concerned that you are going to be surrounded by a lot of people who are extremely good at this sport, rest easy... we are not.