An ode to lawn bowls

Trinity’s history glitters with over a century of sporting glory. Over the years, many aspiring test cricketers and AFL stars have shown their mettle in the green and gold.

But in the summer of 2015/16, only one senior Trinity team brought home any silverware: the Lawn Bowls team. When the 2016 Drama Captain-elect, my friend Lachlan Gough (née Clarke), approached me in the lead up to that fateful summer, the last thing I expected was a sporting proposition. He, with VisCom guru-and-frontman-of-indie-rock-band-The-Smoking-Figs Brett Rothnie as coach, was resurrecting the school’s Lawn Bowls team. Lachie was to be captain, and he wanted me to be his vice.

Well, I’d grown up across the road from the Fairfield Bowling Club, and I’d spent many a summer evening treading the green barefoot. He didn’t need to ask me twice.

We ran a relentless recruitment campaign with the promise of jerseys with custom nicknames and numbers. We signed up a total of 11 players for the sport, almost enough for four teams, while lesser sports struggled to fill two.

That season was full of characters. From the external coach who claimed to have coached the Indian Lawn Bowls team in the Commonwealth Games and still wore the Team India jersey they’d given him (I don’t reckon he’d taken it off since), to the boater hatted puritan who ran the school’s competition and couldn’t stand the green-and-gold zinc ‘warpaint’ we wore each Saturday.

And even though our team didn’t win a game all year (that premiership was won by the nominal Second III – shoutout to Adoni Konstantopoulos, Luke Fethers and Gabe Hill), it was genuinely the most fun I had on the school sports field. Lawn Bowls is a cracker of a sport, and I wouldn’t have known it had it not been for that summer. Even now I play carpet bowls with my housemates to pass the time, and having the stories of that summer up my sleeve is great for work Christmas parties at bowls clubs.

Vive la Invincibowls!