Florida Junior Gold Series

Time to get those teams together! 👏🏻

The 2026-2027 USA Bowling Regional Tournament schedule has been announced! These 16 regional events will take place across the country in two age divisions - U12 and U15 - with more than $120,000 in scholarship available.

To find out when and where these events will take place, click here: https://bit.ly/4gzuOE9

The new season has officially started! While it seemed like it was our largest event participation, it wasn’t, but it sure was close!

Thanks so much to the team at Palm Coast Lanes for hosting us today and for all their hard work. We appreciate you letting us come back each year.

Congratulations to these 17 bowlers who earned their Junior Gold entries for Indianapolis next summer 👏🏻👏🏻

U12 Boys - Jacob Brown

U14/U12 Girls Combined - Arya Rodriguez

U14 Boys - Grayson Albarran & Caleb Crowe

U16 Boys - Hayden Espling, Nicholas Chan, Jett Kramer & Benjamin Herrmann

U16 Girls - Olivia Watson

U18 Boys - Eli Anckner, Cameron Morton, Zachary Marshall, Austin Bergens & Hayden Stuebe

U18 Girls - Bailey Forrest, Isabella Williamson & Chase Ornelas

Special thanks to our scorekeepers today: Mr Brandao, Mr Smith, Brooke & Don 🤩

Our next event will be at Jensen Beach Bowl on Saturday, 9/5/2026. Entries will be capped at 70 bowlers. Hope to see many of you there!

Whether we like it or not, this wave is here now.

This season we have two centers on the schedule with string pins. Next season, there will be at least three centers of the ones we frequent, going to string pins. Maybe more.

Business choices are being made to keep these centers OPEN.

We’ve seen too many centers close over the last 30 years and we’re glad to see proprietors choose to keep them open, thus keeping this sport we all love alive.

It’s here folks…

Pro Tip Friday: String Pins (Part 1: Why It’s Happening)

If you follow bowling news or keep up with your local center, you know string pinsetters are a hot topic across the country right now. Out of my pro shop at Aloma Bowl in Winter Park, Florida, we’re in the middle of this exact transition right now. There’s a lot of chatter on league nights about what this means for the sport, but seeing a center make this level of investment is one of the most encouraging signs I’ve seen in a long time.

I want to share what’s really going on behind the scenes and why centers across the nation are making this move.

1. The old machines have hit their limit. The Brunswick A-2 machines at Aloma were installed back in 1977. While A-2s have been reliable workhorses for decades, finding replacement parts for 50-year-old equipment is almost impossible now. Mechanics have to wait for other centers to shut down just to salvage old parts. Last week alone, I watched mechanics from three other centers here evaluating parts from the machines Aloma is taking out. A simple $10 part can now cost 5x as much, and finding mechanics who can maintain 1,400 moving bearings per machine is getting harder by the day.

2. A center’s biggest expenses are electricity, labor, and parts. String machines use about a third of the electricity and have roughly a tenth of the moving parts of traditional free-fall pinsetters. Instead of taking hours to replace snapped belts or weeks to train a technician, basic maintenance on string pins takes minutes.

3. Investing in the next 50 years: Years ago, I worked in a center that closed its doors permanently. Watching a 32-lane house with a huge community get turned into storage. After seeing several centers in the Orlando area shut down over the years, seeing a house invest serious money into modernizing is a breath of fresh air.

Think back to when centers made the switch from wood to synthetic lanes. People swore the sport was over back then, too. String pins are that same turning point.

Next Friday, I’ll dive into what this means for you as a bowler on the lanes.

2026-2027 FJGS Season Schedule 👇