Cameron Curtis: Commonwealth Games coach profile
Issue: Volume 29 Number 1
As the song goes, ‘everything old is new again’ and bowls national coach Cameron Curtis says Australian lawn bowls is entering a ‘new era’ after spectacular results at the Commonwealth Games.
Curtis went into the Games ‘quietly confident’ of good results and realistically thinking that two golds and one or two other medals would be achievable, after a disappointing solitary silver medal in Manchester four years ago.
The Australian team for Melbourne went on to record its best ever effort at Commonwealth Games with three gold medals, a silver and a bronze from six events.
‘It was a great feeling, but also due recognition for how far we had come and how much hard work our players put in before the Games,’ Curtis says.
Much of the success the 35-year-old coach attributes to Bowls Australia’s new high performance program which has been running for the past 18 months.
As part of the program, Curtis became the sport’s first paid coach, joining a high performance manager and later bringing an assistant coach, a sport scientist and a sport psychologist onto the high performance team.
The sport also introduced a series of Grand Prix events in 2005 and national camps which helped refine the selection process for teams.
Curtis says more emphasis has also been put on developing players’ mental skills. ‘We’ve spent time at the AIS with the archery team and other target sports and learned a lot from that process.
‘We also worked closely with sport psychologists to help our players deal with the pressures they would encounter with the tie break system they would face at the Games.’
For the first time in major international competition, the sport introduced a ‘set play’ scoring system at the Commonwealth Games. Traditionally bowls is scored on the first player or team to reach 21 shots or the highest score after 21 ends.
In the set play system at the Games scoring was based on the best two sets, nine ends. If teams won a set or tied both sets then the players went on to a tiebreaker of three ends. In this ‘shoot out’, shots did not count, rather it was the person or team who won two of the three ends who came away with a match win.
Nowhere was the importance of shoot out practice more evident than in Australian Kelvin Kerkow’s gold medal winning performance on the last end of a shoot out with Welsh bowler Robert Weale. After the match, an enthusiastic Kerkow attributed his relaxed approach to the number of tie-breakers he’d played over the previous 18 months as part of the high performance program.
Curtis also says the home venue and home crowd helped spur the team on. ‘The crowd was magnificent. They weren’t the traditional crowd. There were a lot of young people in the crowd, a lot of non-bowlers and I think their added enthusiasm and noise spurred our players to greater heights.
Curtis says that even with the good results, there is still room for improvement.
‘We’re not silly enough to believe that we’ve got all the ingredients right with regards to the high performance program. A lot of our systems are still brand new, but the results suggest that we’re on the right track.'
