Survey: Your 131 responses

Bowling News

This is the first of two postings of the results of our survey looking at when bowlers think and are prepared to return to the greens. We are indebted to the 131 respondents to this survey which is a huge response indicating the importance and interest that bowlers attach to this situation. Thank you for your input, we couldn't have done it without you.

Tomorrow we share with you all the 91 comments received in the survey in response to the question posed 'What concerns you about returning to bowling in 2021?'

Today we look at the four other questions we asked and provide the count for each with a commentary trying to make sense of the figures.

As previously indicated we intend running this exact same survey three times. Again after the 22 February announcement on the Road Map to Normality and then again late March. This is to gauge if people's views are changing as circumstances change.

THE SURVEY FEEDBACK

Q1 Which age bracket are you in?

88.5% of the respondents were aged 60 or over.

Q2 Which Leagues do you bowl in?

A good presentation of all local leagues with a minimum of 20 representatives from each League apart from the Junior League. Bearing in mind the sway in answers to Q1 it is not surprising that the largest body of voters comes from the Veterans League.

Q3 When are you currently prepared to start bowling this year?

Over a third of the votes came from people prepared for an immediate resumption of bowling. The next largest number was 28% of respondents who indicated that they would only resume bowling after receiving their second vaccine injection. Only the Over-80s (8.5%) can expect to have received a second vaccine prior to the beginning of April. This would obviously have a big impact on player availability should the season start in April as normal,

For the over 70s (58.5%) the bulk of this age group can expect to have received their second vaccine by the end of April but lower age groups (41.5%) will be later which will affect a May restart of competitive bowling.

There is a flaw in this graphic as it shows the 'Ready to bowl after receiving the first vaccine' result twice. These two figures have been added together for the commentary.

Q4 When do you think that we will all be allowed to return to bowling?

Only 10.7% of the respondents expect a resumption of bowling in April with early May being the most expected outcome (36.6%). Worryingly over 5% don't expect to see bowling resumed in this calendar year at all.

Thank you to you all for the huge response to this survey. As previously indicated we intend running this exact same survey three times. Again after the 22 February announcement on the Road Map to Normality and then again late March. This is to gauge if people's views are changing as circumstances change. We hope that you will take the time to complete the survey again then.