Chilton’s Miners’ Welfare Park hosted the reboot of National Zero Bowls at the weekend, reports Scott Morland.
Zero Bowls is a competition that was started in Darlington in 2022 hosting champions from Hong Kong, England and further afield.
The difference between a standard game of bowls and Zero Bowls is that you receive four stickers before the game with numbers 0,1,2,3 on them, giving the new value of your bowl.
The short explanation is that you could win every end of a game and still not win if only your bowl with the ‘0’ sticker has counted which changes the whole tactical approach to the sport!
This competition is now being newly promoted with Chilton being named as the home of Zero Bowls which we expect to grow year on year.
The weekend hosted a singles competition where bowlers from around the North East pushed for qualification to the National Zero Bowls Finals, to be held in Nottingham in 2027.
Players took part in a round-robin where four players made a semi-final and the remaining two qualified for the National Finals as a pair at Bottesford Bowls Club.
The semi-finalists were William Morland of Chilton Excavators, Ian Henderson of Houghton Dairy Lane BC, Garth Coates and Darren Blood, both of Hundens BC (Darlington).
Garth, who had a fantastic performing day of bowls beat Ian Henderson, while Darren beat Bill which saw two friends qualify together for the finals next year.
Garth was the overall winner and was presented with the Andy Dixon trophy by Cllr David English, who is our amazing volunteer at the park.
Andy Dixon was a great man who unfortunately passed away just before Zero Bowls was launched first time around, but he hated the stuffy old-school bowling stereotype and would have heavily approved of the attempts to modernise the sport in this way!
We look forward to 18 April 2027 when the next qualifier will be held at Chilton and we welcome entries from anyone who fancies giving it a crack!
Scott Morland
Ferryhill & Chilton's local community newspaper.
