As I See It

Flying Pins and First Names

A bowling league helped to make our large staff more cohesive.

By Paul S. Koch, MD, Editor Emeritus

You may have noticed the number of articles written recently in business magazines about team building, team development and team dynamics. While not addressing this topic directly, one astute reader of this column did take the time to ask me about a brief comment I made a few articles back, when I had briefly mentioned an office bowling league. At the time, our team was mired in 8th place but by the end of the season had clawed our way up to fifth, only one point out of fourth.

The story of our league dates back to a few seasons ago when one of our doctors had been involved in a Junior Achievement fundraiser, a bowl-a-thon for which each participant paid a small fee and promised to raise a lot more. It struck a chord within our office, and before you knew it we had 50 people signed up to participate. Great fun was had by all. Let's do it again, shall we?

Let the Good Times Roll

One employee ran with the ball (“How she ran with a 16-pound ball I'll never know”—Groucho Marx) and soon she had arranged for lanes, a night and an 18-week season. Thirty-two people signed up, mostly staff, but also a few spouses, relatives and friends. And some hairdressers… some very competitive hairdressers.

One season led to another and by this time the gloves were off, as everyone scurried to put together a competitive team. Our fellows set up a team called “The Underpaid” and gathered a few other strong and athletic bowlers. Others took advantage of their very low averages and banded together, hoping their high handicaps would prove unbeatable. My strategy was to team up with three cute nurses who like to drink beer. To each his own.

The practice put up a subsidy to defray some of the cost, leaving each bowler to pay just seven dollars per week for shoes, three lanes of bowling and an awards party at the end of the season.

Each week we get paired against another team, battling head-to-head for three strings, one point to the winner of each. After a few weeks, the scores separated the teams into a ranking and the bowling became more interesting. We not only wanted to score points for our team, but also checked to see how our closest competitors were doing.

Some bowlers were rank beginners. One threw the ball so timidly we thought it was going to bounce off the head pin and roll back again. Others were pretty darn good, and on two occasions we stopped bowling and gathered around while an experienced bowler began a string with 10 consecutive strikes. Alas, in each case a pin remained standing on the 11th try and the perfect 300 game was missed.

Many teams had bowlers from different office locations. By the time we finished two round-robins, we had made friends with coworkers we might not otherwise have seen except at office-wide events, and even then might never meet. Now everyone was on a friendly and first-name basis. Even the doctors went by their first names, though mine was still stretched out to Doctor Paul.

We are now in our third season, bowling on right through the summer. We're not the same 32 as last season; some took the summer off, and some others came on board to replace them. That gives us more chances to meet more people who we ostensibly work with, but with whom we rarely interact. It forges friendships and puts a face on the other end of the telephone.

Pin Pals

I share this story because our office needed a way to blow off steam, a place where people meet and names become faces, where seniority and titles mean less than whether you can pick up a spare. We were lucky to have stumbled into this, which is precisely what one wife of a staffer does whenever she releases the ball. OM

Paul S. Koch, MD is editor emeritus of Ophthalmology Management and the medical director of Koch Eye Associates in Warwick, RI. His e-mail is paulkoch@kocheye.com.