ABOUT US

Short Form Bowls Ltd was founded by Paul Christian (Fletch) when he discovered there were no national pathway events for Centre junior title winners. For ‘junior’, he uses the 1 to 8 playing years definition. It all started at Paritutu where he’d been sponsoring the Junior Winter Classic. He came up with a new format (Super Singles : 3 bowl, 2 sets of 6 ends, 1 end tiebreak) and ran an event in the winter of 2022 to see how it would run as a comp. It was really well received by the players, and here’s some footage from that day.

2/23

Super Singles got truly underway in this season. A formula for national qualifying and finals was created whereby half the entry fees get paid out in the local qualifying events, and half get paid forward into the finals prize pool. Qualifiers from 24 Centres came together in Naenae for the finals, most of whom had played local qualifying events, and some who got through uncontested. 193 players nationwide participated in the 2022/23 tournament, and the prize pool for the finals was $4,000. This event was live-streamed on the Bowls NZ Youtube channel with John McBeth kindly doing the commentary.

2023/24

This season saw the Super Singles tournament attract 372 entrants with qualifying events in 21 Centres, which is the whole country excluding Far North, Northland, Marlborough, Buller, West Coast and North Otago. The finals in Naenae went well again, and with a prize pool of $7,500. We attempted to live stream this ourselves but had a few technical glitches with the video. However, Pat Horgan did an outstanding job providing live audio commentary, and he’s our man for this moving forward.

During this season, quite a few emails came in requesting we run a junior pairs event, so we launched the Power Pairs national qualifiers and finals. There was a tremendous response to this with 434 players entering to produce 18 finalists battling it out for $6,000 prizemoney under the cover at New Lynn.

2025

The now-established 1to8 events continue as the NZ Development Singles and Pairs. With no NZ Indoor (Lawn Bowls) Open Singles championship in the calendar, we ran an open event at Tauranga South on the 24th and 25th July featuring international and ex-international players Selina Goddard, Keanu Darby, Lisa White, Corey Wedlock and Aaron Wilson. It went very well and gave us the confidence to launch the NZ Indoor Open Singles and Pairs, and the NZ 60+ Indoor Singles and Pairs.

We also refined the short form games to be a set number of ends rather than set play. So singles is now 14 ends of 4 bowl, and pairs 10 ends of 3 bowl.

We have also set up an incorporated society called the NZ Short Form Bowls Association which is responsible for player welfare fundraising.