Couple of things...
* For those of you that follow college football, Dennis Franchione, currently the head coach at Texas A&M, was formerly head coach at The University of Alabama. Not that Texas A&M is chopped liver, but Alabama is generally regarded as one of the five best jobs in college football, if not the top job. Franchione never played football beyond high school -- he was a baseball player in college. For that matter, I think I'm correct in saying Texas Tech head coach Mike Leach never played the sport at all (edit: He did play, and was a scrub on his own high school team). In general, I can't name you very many wildly successful coaches in any sport who were also great players, so we shouldn't expect bowling to be any different. For that matter -- and I wish I could remember the book's author or title -- there's a book that came out about five years ago that studied this phenomenon.
* The other issue is getting enough decent -- not excellent, but decent -- coaches to stock youth programs around the country. Depending on where you live, it's da*ned difficult to find enough adults with the time and desire to coach young bowlers. A coach that has even just above-average skills, but has the tools necessary to know how to impart that knowledge to young people, is worth a lot.
Don't try to tie playing ability to coaching ability. Plenty of evidence out there shows the two have little, if anything to do with each other.
Jess
Edited on 8/3/2007 10:36 PM