A new ball game
November 30, 2025
Call it the canary in the coal mine.
Entered into the 2002 American Bowling Congress (ABC) Masters in Reno’s National Bowling Stadium as an amateur, Brett Wolfe noticed something that both alarmed and intrigued him.
“They hooked quite a bit at that tournament,” recalls Wolfe, a big, strapping southpaw who revved up the ball as much as nearly any power player at the time.
He speaks in a deep, sturdy, full-throated voice. It is the voice of a guy who talks with the same conviction that informs the decisions he makes. It would take a man of towering conviction to stand behind the decisions he made in Reno that week.
Wolfe observed that balls “were jumping off of the pattern at the end. They were going sideways. At that point, I figured, let me throw something that will slow the pattern down a little bit and make it so that, when I do miss, my leave is not catastrophic.”
What follows will sound familiar to bowlers of today. But bear in mind that this was 2002 — 23 years ago — a time when reactive bowling balls had all but erased urethane equipment from the competitive landscape. Oh, but do not get Wolfe wrong. He tried.
“I tried the resin balls during qualifying, and every miss was six. You know — 2-4-7-8s, 9-8s — that type of thing. It was very hard to control the ball at the end of that pattern.”
In a burst of foresight so uncanny at the time as to be mystifying to even the PBA Tour’s most experienced players, he leaned on two balls the bowling world thought it had left so far behind they belonged in the same technological graveyard as the rotary phone and the 8-track: His 1993 Faball urethane Blue Hammer and — why not? — its pearlized counterpart, to boot.
Wolfe’s solid Blue Hammer had about 600 games on it by then, he estimates, and it was nearly a decade old. In 2002, it might as well have been an artifact painstakingly extracted from some archaeological dig bearing the secrets of a bygone age.
The ball was special for other reasons, too.
“That was the ball I shot my first 300 with,” Wolfe says. “I didn’t shoot 300 until I was an adult. It was December 7, 1995. I walked in late to league with that ball, caved in the Big Four on the first shot, and then threw 11 in a row in the pocket, and that was my first 300.”
Nearly a decade later in Reno, Wolfe, surrounded by players battling that “sideways” ball reaction with the wrong tool, found in his dusty old urethane Blue Hammer the kind of controlled ball motion no one else in the building could capture with the reactive equipment that dominated the era.
Much like that night he showed up late to league and blasted the first perfecto of his adult bowling career, his Blue Hammer got striking in Reno. Early and often. So often, in fact, that it helped Wolfe blast his way to the top seed position over a match-play field speckled with PBA Tour champions.
But this was the Masters, after all. A tournament with the quirky, double-elimination bracket format that had yielded numerous amateur champions before him — Rick Steelsmith in 1987, Ken Johnson in 1992, Steve Fehr in 1994, Jason Queen in 1997, Brian Boghosian in 1999. It is the tournament in which these things happen. But it never had happened quite like this.
As Brian Voss noted on the tournament’s TV finals broadcast in his capacity as guest analyst, “Not many guys can come out against the best players in the world and use a urethane ball and beat us.”
Who can imagine a color analyst saying such a thing on a PBA Tour telecast in 2025? Randy Pedersen, then in the early years of his long tenure as color commentator, chimed in with an observation that, unbeknownst to him at the time, foreshadowed a path innumerable bowlers would follow in the decades to come — a path first laid by Brett Wolfe.
“The reason why he’s using a urethane ball is because he’s got so much power and so many revs that, if he was throwing a reactive ball, he wouldn’t be able to play the line he is playing.”
One can be forgiven in 2025 for hearing that as the sentence that opened Pandora’s Box.
The experience of Wolfe’s opponent in the championship match — fellow lefthander and PBA Tour champion Dennis Horan Jr. — underscored his decision to throw urethane at a time when hardly anyone else was doing so. On the left lane in particular, Horan watched his reactive ball do precisely what Wolfe had observed when that week began — scream off the end of the pattern in a nearly sideways motion. Putting a punctuation mark on Horan’s struggles was a shot he threw in his eighth frame. With Wolfe sitting on a six-bagger at that moment, Horan saw his ball check up sharply to leave a 6-8-10 split that saw seven pins vanish from the pin deck so quickly they might as well have gone up in smoke.
“Watch how fast this is!” Pedersen said in amazement as Horan’s shot replayed in slow-mo.
It was fast, indeed — far faster, it turned out, than the speed at which the pro-bowling world caught on to the magic Wolfe had unleashed that day.
It would be seven years before a ball company thrust a urethane option into the market — Storm’s The Natural in 2009, and five more before the same company release another urethane ball, the Pitch Black, in 2014. By the time of the Purple Hammer’s arrival in 2016, urethane’s resurgence began catching on much more broadly.
Wolfe’s victory netted him what was then the richest prize the Masters tournament ever awarded — $100,000, a sum that enabled Wolfe, then 25 years old, to quit his Reno-based job for Coca-Cola a few months later and try his own luck on tour. He himself did not find much luck there, but his visionary use of the ball technology of old has since generated a fortune for plenty of players, many of them lefties, since then.
That fortune has come at a cost, however, culminating with four key concerns that prompted the United States Bowling Congress to take action. In a Sept. 4 announcement, after years of analysis, testing, data-gathering and the published reports those efforts informed, USBC established restrictions on urethane-ball usage in USBC championship events.
New Rules
USBC’s Sept. 4 announcement carefully defined urethane as “slow oil-absorbing high-performance bowling balls.” Starting on Jan. 1, 2026, such equipment, regardless of hardness specification, will be prohibited in:
Among the four key concerns that precipitated these actions was that of “athlete development.” Specifically, USBC’s announcement expressed that widening urethane-dependency “may reduce player versatility and hinder long-term skill development, particularly among younger and developing athletes.”
Other areas of concern include:
Competitive Fairness — Competitive imbalances created by the coexistence of urethane and reactive equipment in a given playing environment.
Governance and Integrity Challenges — The nearly impossible task of distinguishing between balls that have softened naturally through use and balls softened by artificial (chemical) means.
Lane Pattern Integrity — The reality that urethane balls destroy lane-pattern intent more rapidly, “creating imbalances between different styles of players.”
Lane-Pattern Intent and Athlete Development
USBC’s concerns about urethane’s impact on variables such as lane-pattern intent and athlete development are amplified by many experienced voices from every level of competition in the sport today. Those voices include players, coaches, and even parents whose children have had to contend, sometimes with no small degree of frustration or even resentment, with the implications of urethane’s destruction of lane-pattern intent in a given environment.
Take Amanda Murray, mom to three accomplished youth bowlers — daughter Ellie Kate (11), and sons Gavin (18) and Dylan (19) — each of whom have been regulars in events like the USBC Junior Gold Championships.
At the 2025 USBC Junior Gold Championships, Murray says, “Especially in the final advancers’ round and the advancers’ round, it was very, very frustrating from a competitor perspective, and from a parent perspective — especially when I found out what the patterns were, and I am looking at how the lanes were played. Everybody was piping those urethanes, and it ended up playing like a wide-open house shot. There is no rhyme or reason why a Junior Gold pattern should have opened up that easily.”
Murray’s observation that urethane-dependent players are, in some environments, crushing more skillful and versatile players who are attacking the pattern with reactive equipment is echoed by elite competitors.
Kyle Troup, winner in 2024 of the U.S. Open in which urethane will be banned in 2026 and a player who concedes that he uses urethane a good bit, sees urethane’s prevalence eroding skill, particularly among youth bowlers.
“It is a crutch; it is kind of rough for the game. Tons of kids use it and don’t really learn touch at a younger age,” Troup says while adding the caveat that, “I gripe about it sometimes, too, when I am not striking with urethane and I’m getting run over by a lot of the guys, but, hey, I never say, ‘God, I wish urethane balls weren’t around. I wish balls with over 50 diff weren’t around.’ Then we’re just nit-picking.”
Troup adds that, while working a recent Storm Youth Championship event, “where they bowl on a short, a medium, and a long [pattern], I barely saw any resin balls on the racks on the short and the medium. They’re not bowling on super easy patterns — it’s a 3-to-1 pattern or so — and it was just a ’thane fest on Saturday (on 35 and 40 feet), but on that long pattern, the kids that typically use urethane don’t bowl well.”
Troup adds that, “I hate it for their generation, but the ones who truly understand the game or want to elevate themselves to the next level, they will figure out how to properly use it or throw it. If you’re able to outstrike me or knock down more pins than me throwing urethane, get after it, but it’s definitely going to be harder for them growing up to learn proper ball changes and transitions and they may lose out on that touch.”
That said, Troup distinguishes between younger players who may be deploying urethane as more of a crutch and pros who still bring a broad range of skill to their use of the same equipment.
“I throw urethane a lot, but my urethane ball is pretty smooth, too, so we’ve got lots of tricks. Drop the speed, loft the fronts. There are multiple tricks that we implement on the national tour when it comes to using urethane.”
Work Ethic
Those tricks Troup refers to are ones the major-champion developed through hard work, trial and error, and the accumulation of knowledge — all variables that Eldon Dunbar III, father to accomplished youth bowlers Jacob (16), Randal (21) and Eldon IV (23), does not see players sharpening in New England.
“In our area, I’d say 80 to 85 percent [of youth bowlers] are using urethane on almost everything, and they’re winning,” Dunbar says. “I don’t know if it’s easier for them, or if they don’t want to work as hard. I hope they’re not trying to not work as hard, but it just seems like, ‘If it doesn’t work, we’ll go to urethane.’”
Dunbar expresses hope that USBC’s announced restrictions on urethane usage might swing the pendulum back in a direction in which physical skill, knowledge and, yes, the work those elements demand might eat into the complacency he observes among youth bowlers in his part of the country. He also expresses the kind of demoralization that has set in among parents when he notes that, “I can only speak for youth bowlers in our area, but I’m not optimistic, because I don’t think they want to work.”
Enter Nate Purches, another product of New England and the 2024 Harry Golden PBA Rookie of the Year. He is forcing them to work with his so-called “No-‘Thane” tournament concept.
He ran with the concept, he says, “To see how a pattern would transition, how people would play it, to have more of a test and see, ‘Hey, if we ever have [a urethane ban], what is going to happen?”
Purches hopes no-urethane tournaments provide platforms on which the point can be made that, “Urethane is not a crutch; it’s more of a tool … I honestly enjoyed every minute of it, watching people try different lines, try different balls, and I thought it was a great success.”
Purches’ decision to run a no-urethane tournament derived in part from the very realities Dunbar identifies. Along with his dad Jeff, himself a longtime organizer of youth-bowling events in the area, “One thing we both see around here is that, no matter what the pattern is — it could be 50 feet; it could be 47 feet — we will always see someone with Purple Hammer in-hand.
“I’m not bashing the Purple Hammer at all; it’s a great ball, but what we’re trying to do is eliminate those kinds of balls to get these kids ready for the next step. With all these new USBC rules, the Purple Hammer is banned (except in aforementioned circumstances such as Junior Gold qualifying, the USBC Collegiate regular season, events in which no restrictions will be in place, and other exceptions), the question is, ‘Hey, when we get ready to bowl PBA Jr. events or PBA Regionals, how do we take your game to the next level?’”
PBA Tour lefthanders like Packy Hanrahan and Keven Williams, the latter of whom won his only PBA Tour title with a urethane ball (the 2022 PBA Shark Championship), also see abundant opportunity and need for younger players to think beyond urethane.
Hanrahan, a two-time PBA Tour champion, says Junior Gold hopefuls looking ahead to a 2026 tournament in which urethane is banned after qualifying would be wise to accept that, “Practice is the place where you should be uncomfortable. You should try new things that you’re not good at. A lot of youth bowlers are really good with urethane balls. I’ve always pushed them, ‘Hey, if you can strike 10 times a game with your urethane ball, you probably don’t need to worry about practicing with that one, do you?’ So, maybe you’re bowling on your traditional house shot and we get outside of 5 and try throwing a reactive ball and hit the pocket. Learn how to do different things to expand the tool bag and just get more tools into your arsenal that aren’t ball-related.’ That’s always been my mindset.”
Williams, with whom Hanrahan worked a series of coaching clinics in October, says, “The biggest reason for making [the changes that USBC has implemented] is what the youth look like when you go to events. When you go to a Junior Gold event and there are 10 balls on the rack, eight of them were usually urethane balls — no matter the pattern. I think that was a big reason why they needed to make some changes in the game because, for whatever reason — if urethane was a crutch to some bowlers, or it was taking away from the talent level, or it was changing the lanes too much — the honest truth is that most of the people who will be affected by this are the youth, because they just get so good with urethane balls. At Junior Gold this year, it didn’t matter what the pattern was; everyone was trying to throw urethane.”
As a lefthander, Williams concedes that urethane has been particularly beneficial for bowlers on the portside, and the option continues to be wildly popular — even unavoidable — for them.
“Lefties have to try urethane, even if it’s a pattern that says you can’t throw urethane, you have to try it because, if it works, you can almost be unbeatable,” he says.
Hanrahan adds that, “If you look at all the righties, they use it every block the first two games. The lefties just don’t have the traffic to eventually switch out of it. If the lefties do switch out of it, they do it maybe in Game 6, 7 or 8 — and most of our blocks now on the PBA Tour are six.
“So, we don’t have the amount of bowlers or the transition to actually switch out of it. We end up using it the whole block whereas the righties use it for two games so they don’t give up pins on the fresh. It’s manage the first two games, try and get out of there plus 20 or 30, then take a step to the left and throw it to the little friction to the right and the little hold to the left spot that we have down-lane.”
Essentially, Hanrahan asks those pointing fingers at lefties for their perceived urethane-dependency to do the math.
If right-handers largely toss urethane the first two games of a block, he reasons, "That's two games with five people on every pair and four of them are right-handed. They do the same thing as us; they just have to switch out of it” because of the greater volume of traffic on the right side.
A Game Changer for College Recruiters
For Shannon O’Keefe, who helmed the stout McKendree bowling program with husband Bryan before moving over to the women’s team at Jacksonville State, USBC’s new urethane restrictions likely will change the mindset of college coaches looking to recruit fresh talent.
While women’s competitors are far less affected by urethane restrictions than men — albeit it with the exception of lefthanders among women, who may be more prone to using urethane — O’Keefe avers that, “On the guys’ side of college bowling, urethane has gotten out of hand. It is more like a crutch. If we were still recruiting on the guys’ side of things, I think we most definitely would be looking at how successful kids are when they’re hard without urethane. We look at that on the girls’ side too, you know — you have the much younger ones using urethane, more often than not. We’re already recruiting the class of 2027 and looking ahead to the class of 2028, and if there are kids in those classes who have predominantly found success with urethane, they may not be as attractive to us.”
Julia Bond, the Nebraska assistant coach and PWBA Tour champion who also sees urethane restrictions having an impact on recruiting philosophy going forward, agrees.
“Even if the decisions might not be correct [among college prospects], are we trying different things? Are we trying to think out of the box? Or are we just using the same thing hoping for a different result?”
When it comes time for match play at the 2026 USBC Junior Gold Championships, where urethane will be banned, Bond expresses the hope that she will see “more variation in rotation or hand position. I get it. I was no different as a youth player. You get good at doing what you do and how you do it, and when you get challenged, I see a lot of ball changes being made. Sometimes, that is the solution; I am not going to deny that. As a pro, I do it, too. But there are times when it feels like all the balls are doing the same thing. With these girls coming in [at Nebraska], I’ll kind of just ask them, ‘Can you just get around it? Just a little bit? Just for funsies?’ And they’ll do it, and they’ll see a different motion, and you can kind of see that light bulb go off and they’re like, ‘Oh, I can do that!’ I would like to see a little bit more of that subtlety and finesse.”
The Coaching Gap
For Murray, the erosion of skill urethane has precipitated applies as well to college coaches as it may apply to players at any level of the sport.
“Honestly, some of the coaches at the collegiate level don’t have the coaching ability to adjust for that. I hate to be that way, but [those coaches] are going to struggle to try to bring in 10 guys who have thrown urethane for the past four years who all of a sudden have to figure out how to not do that, and their coaches can’t walk them through that. I think you’re going to see a couple of years of some really mad coaches and some really mad players, but I think that, long-term, you’re going to see more actual skill come back as opposed to relying solely on that crutch that is urethane. You walk into any collegiate tournament these days, and there’s 12 purple urethanes all on the rack at once.”
Which is a phenomenon Purches says he himself has seen and marveled at.
“There are some tournaments in college — and I have seen photos of this — with the entire rack being Purple Hammers. I’ve seen crazy stuff in college, pro and youth, but that was, by far, one of the craziest photos I’ve ever seen.”
Pro Approach
As for how the pros themselves plan to approach events like the 2026 USBC Masters and U.S. Open, where urethane will be prohibited, every pro quoted in this story thus far has expressed an eagerness to embrace the challenge that new landscape presents — be it with different layouts or surfaces, or different bowling balls they expect manufacturers to deliver to the marketplace that will mimic urethane motion without being urethane bowling balls.
“Ball manufacturers will make different types of bowling balls. We’ve seen it from companies already, where they’ve made kind of the non-urethane/urethane-type reaction ball. Moving forward, I think the companies will lean into more of those types of bowling balls,” Williams says.
By and large, though, pros plan to lean into their own skill sets and rely on their own experience, knowledge and instincts in the face of urethane controls in at least those two major-title events.
At the U.S. Open, Troup says, “The get-out-of-jail ball was throw urethane at the pocket, try to bowl 190 to 210 and get some oil down the lane. So, obviously, that’s going to change. For me, I’m going to have to venture out of my typical layouts on resin balls because that’s really the only other option, but they’re going to have to be drilled differently than they have in the past. Personally, I’ve already started working on that. We’re going to start playing around with some different layouts on some balls just to get them to really smooth out.”
Troup adds that, “The other thing to think about is the oil down the lane. I guess Games 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 will look a little bit different on the short as there’s not that massive puddle that urethane left in the hook spot.”
One of the quirkiest adjustments Troup anticipates? Flame-throwing, urethane-loving two-hander Jesper Svensson sending messengers flying with a 180-grit plastic ball.
“I would not be surprised in the slightest,” says a chuckling Troup, one of Svensson’s closest friends.
As for the Masters, Mykel Holliman, a lefthander who finished runner-up in the 2019 event, says that urethane has not been the option in recent Masters events anyway.
“This year at the Masters, lefties didn’t have to throw urethane,” Holliman says. “We were all able to throw reactives, which was good. I just hope USBC keeps making patterns where the lefties have a fighting chance with reactive balls trying to do certain things.
“Everybody knows that the righties eventually will get their own shot,” he adds. “There are so many righties, and good right-handers, who know how to break down patterns.”
Wolfe Wisdom
Which brings us back to the man who, in a very real sense, started it all — Brett Wolfe with that decade-old, mileage-worn Blue Hammer that helped him bank a hundred grand back at the 2002 Masters. These days, he is a 49-year-old eagerly looking forward to becoming eligible to bowl the PBA50 Tour upon turning 50 years old. In the meantime, however, he has retired following 15 years with Edward Jones and offers “about 20 lessons a week” at the B3 Performance training center in Tempe, Arizona, which happens to be run by his brother-in-law and younger sister.
“As the power game has rapidly increased with two-handers and EJs and guys who can really do it, everybody is looking for a way to control the lane down-lane, and the urethane balls would do that,” Wolfe observes.
Now, however, competitors battling environments like Junior Gold match play, where urethane will not be an option, “will have to figure out how short-pin layouts work, and how control layouts work with resin balls.”
In Wolfe’s view, “What’s the point of throwing urethane in qualifying if you’re not going to be able to throw it the next day?”
Wolfe makes the broader point that, “There’s always a shock when something changes. But, when people come in and we have conversations [about developments like urethane restrictions], they understand, ‘Hey, if this is the way it goes, you still can bowl. You still can learn. You just have to be willing to think outside the box a little bit. Don’t always drill super-strong balls.’ I joke that I want to bring in a golf bag and say, ‘This is the average bowler’s golf bag,’ and it’s five drivers and a putter. I tell them, ‘You need to learn to bowl with some other tools. There are balls between urethane and super-resin that can make it work.’ The people who are open to hearing that and listening, they succeed, and they start to be less apprehensive about going away from the Purple, and they say, ‘Hey, let me try some of these other bowling balls.’
“It’s evolve or die,” Wolfe adds. “We drill resin balls, and I have a few that are pretty quiet down-lane resin-wise, and that’s all it is: What are you going to do? You can complain about it and not make any money, or you can learn and evolve.”
Entered into the 2002 American Bowling Congress (ABC) Masters in Reno’s National Bowling Stadium as an amateur, Brett Wolfe noticed something that both alarmed and intrigued him.
“They hooked quite a bit at that tournament,” recalls Wolfe, a big, strapping southpaw who revved up the ball as much as nearly any power player at the time.
He speaks in a deep, sturdy, full-throated voice. It is the voice of a guy who talks with the same conviction that informs the decisions he makes. It would take a man of towering conviction to stand behind the decisions he made in Reno that week.
Wolfe observed that balls “were jumping off of the pattern at the end. They were going sideways. At that point, I figured, let me throw something that will slow the pattern down a little bit and make it so that, when I do miss, my leave is not catastrophic.”
What follows will sound familiar to bowlers of today. But bear in mind that this was 2002 — 23 years ago — a time when reactive bowling balls had all but erased urethane equipment from the competitive landscape. Oh, but do not get Wolfe wrong. He tried.
“I tried the resin balls during qualifying, and every miss was six. You know — 2-4-7-8s, 9-8s — that type of thing. It was very hard to control the ball at the end of that pattern.”
In a burst of foresight so uncanny at the time as to be mystifying to even the PBA Tour’s most experienced players, he leaned on two balls the bowling world thought it had left so far behind they belonged in the same technological graveyard as the rotary phone and the 8-track: His 1993 Faball urethane Blue Hammer and — why not? — its pearlized counterpart, to boot.
Wolfe’s solid Blue Hammer had about 600 games on it by then, he estimates, and it was nearly a decade old. In 2002, it might as well have been an artifact painstakingly extracted from some archaeological dig bearing the secrets of a bygone age.
The ball was special for other reasons, too.
“That was the ball I shot my first 300 with,” Wolfe says. “I didn’t shoot 300 until I was an adult. It was December 7, 1995. I walked in late to league with that ball, caved in the Big Four on the first shot, and then threw 11 in a row in the pocket, and that was my first 300.”
Nearly a decade later in Reno, Wolfe, surrounded by players battling that “sideways” ball reaction with the wrong tool, found in his dusty old urethane Blue Hammer the kind of controlled ball motion no one else in the building could capture with the reactive equipment that dominated the era.
Much like that night he showed up late to league and blasted the first perfecto of his adult bowling career, his Blue Hammer got striking in Reno. Early and often. So often, in fact, that it helped Wolfe blast his way to the top seed position over a match-play field speckled with PBA Tour champions.
But this was the Masters, after all. A tournament with the quirky, double-elimination bracket format that had yielded numerous amateur champions before him — Rick Steelsmith in 1987, Ken Johnson in 1992, Steve Fehr in 1994, Jason Queen in 1997, Brian Boghosian in 1999. It is the tournament in which these things happen. But it never had happened quite like this.
As Brian Voss noted on the tournament’s TV finals broadcast in his capacity as guest analyst, “Not many guys can come out against the best players in the world and use a urethane ball and beat us.”
Who can imagine a color analyst saying such a thing on a PBA Tour telecast in 2025? Randy Pedersen, then in the early years of his long tenure as color commentator, chimed in with an observation that, unbeknownst to him at the time, foreshadowed a path innumerable bowlers would follow in the decades to come — a path first laid by Brett Wolfe.
“The reason why he’s using a urethane ball is because he’s got so much power and so many revs that, if he was throwing a reactive ball, he wouldn’t be able to play the line he is playing.”
One can be forgiven in 2025 for hearing that as the sentence that opened Pandora’s Box.
The experience of Wolfe’s opponent in the championship match — fellow lefthander and PBA Tour champion Dennis Horan Jr. — underscored his decision to throw urethane at a time when hardly anyone else was doing so. On the left lane in particular, Horan watched his reactive ball do precisely what Wolfe had observed when that week began — scream off the end of the pattern in a nearly sideways motion. Putting a punctuation mark on Horan’s struggles was a shot he threw in his eighth frame. With Wolfe sitting on a six-bagger at that moment, Horan saw his ball check up sharply to leave a 6-8-10 split that saw seven pins vanish from the pin deck so quickly they might as well have gone up in smoke.
“Watch how fast this is!” Pedersen said in amazement as Horan’s shot replayed in slow-mo.
It was fast, indeed — far faster, it turned out, than the speed at which the pro-bowling world caught on to the magic Wolfe had unleashed that day.
It would be seven years before a ball company thrust a urethane option into the market — Storm’s The Natural in 2009, and five more before the same company release another urethane ball, the Pitch Black, in 2014. By the time of the Purple Hammer’s arrival in 2016, urethane’s resurgence began catching on much more broadly.
Wolfe’s victory netted him what was then the richest prize the Masters tournament ever awarded — $100,000, a sum that enabled Wolfe, then 25 years old, to quit his Reno-based job for Coca-Cola a few months later and try his own luck on tour. He himself did not find much luck there, but his visionary use of the ball technology of old has since generated a fortune for plenty of players, many of them lefties, since then.
That fortune has come at a cost, however, culminating with four key concerns that prompted the United States Bowling Congress to take action. In a Sept. 4 announcement, after years of analysis, testing, data-gathering and the published reports those efforts informed, USBC established restrictions on urethane-ball usage in USBC championship events.
New Rules
USBC’s Sept. 4 announcement carefully defined urethane as “slow oil-absorbing high-performance bowling balls.” Starting on Jan. 1, 2026, such equipment, regardless of hardness specification, will be prohibited in:
- The U.S. Open
- The USBC Masters
- PWBA national-title events, the U.S. Women’s Open, USBC Queens, and all PWBA Regional events
- The U22 Queens and U22 Masters
- The USBC Intercollegiate Team and Singles Championships
- The USA Bowling National Championships
- The Team USA Trials
- The USBC Collegiate Sectional and regular-season USBC Collegiate competitions
- Junior Gold qualifiers
- USA Bowling Regionals
- USBC Senior Championships
- USBC Youth Scratch Championships
- The Forty Frame Game
- The Survivor Tournament
- The USBC Open Championships
- The USBC Women’s Championships
- The Bowlers Journal Championships
- The USBC Senior Masters
- The USBC Super Senior Classic
- The USBC Senior Queens
- The USBC Youth Open Championships
Among the four key concerns that precipitated these actions was that of “athlete development.” Specifically, USBC’s announcement expressed that widening urethane-dependency “may reduce player versatility and hinder long-term skill development, particularly among younger and developing athletes.”
Other areas of concern include:
Competitive Fairness — Competitive imbalances created by the coexistence of urethane and reactive equipment in a given playing environment.
Governance and Integrity Challenges — The nearly impossible task of distinguishing between balls that have softened naturally through use and balls softened by artificial (chemical) means.
Lane Pattern Integrity — The reality that urethane balls destroy lane-pattern intent more rapidly, “creating imbalances between different styles of players.”
Lane-Pattern Intent and Athlete Development
USBC’s concerns about urethane’s impact on variables such as lane-pattern intent and athlete development are amplified by many experienced voices from every level of competition in the sport today. Those voices include players, coaches, and even parents whose children have had to contend, sometimes with no small degree of frustration or even resentment, with the implications of urethane’s destruction of lane-pattern intent in a given environment.
Take Amanda Murray, mom to three accomplished youth bowlers — daughter Ellie Kate (11), and sons Gavin (18) and Dylan (19) — each of whom have been regulars in events like the USBC Junior Gold Championships.
At the 2025 USBC Junior Gold Championships, Murray says, “Especially in the final advancers’ round and the advancers’ round, it was very, very frustrating from a competitor perspective, and from a parent perspective — especially when I found out what the patterns were, and I am looking at how the lanes were played. Everybody was piping those urethanes, and it ended up playing like a wide-open house shot. There is no rhyme or reason why a Junior Gold pattern should have opened up that easily.”
Murray’s observation that urethane-dependent players are, in some environments, crushing more skillful and versatile players who are attacking the pattern with reactive equipment is echoed by elite competitors.
Kyle Troup, winner in 2024 of the U.S. Open in which urethane will be banned in 2026 and a player who concedes that he uses urethane a good bit, sees urethane’s prevalence eroding skill, particularly among youth bowlers.
“It is a crutch; it is kind of rough for the game. Tons of kids use it and don’t really learn touch at a younger age,” Troup says while adding the caveat that, “I gripe about it sometimes, too, when I am not striking with urethane and I’m getting run over by a lot of the guys, but, hey, I never say, ‘God, I wish urethane balls weren’t around. I wish balls with over 50 diff weren’t around.’ Then we’re just nit-picking.”
Troup adds that, while working a recent Storm Youth Championship event, “where they bowl on a short, a medium, and a long [pattern], I barely saw any resin balls on the racks on the short and the medium. They’re not bowling on super easy patterns — it’s a 3-to-1 pattern or so — and it was just a ’thane fest on Saturday (on 35 and 40 feet), but on that long pattern, the kids that typically use urethane don’t bowl well.”
Troup adds that, “I hate it for their generation, but the ones who truly understand the game or want to elevate themselves to the next level, they will figure out how to properly use it or throw it. If you’re able to outstrike me or knock down more pins than me throwing urethane, get after it, but it’s definitely going to be harder for them growing up to learn proper ball changes and transitions and they may lose out on that touch.”
That said, Troup distinguishes between younger players who may be deploying urethane as more of a crutch and pros who still bring a broad range of skill to their use of the same equipment.
“I throw urethane a lot, but my urethane ball is pretty smooth, too, so we’ve got lots of tricks. Drop the speed, loft the fronts. There are multiple tricks that we implement on the national tour when it comes to using urethane.”
Work Ethic
Those tricks Troup refers to are ones the major-champion developed through hard work, trial and error, and the accumulation of knowledge — all variables that Eldon Dunbar III, father to accomplished youth bowlers Jacob (16), Randal (21) and Eldon IV (23), does not see players sharpening in New England.
“In our area, I’d say 80 to 85 percent [of youth bowlers] are using urethane on almost everything, and they’re winning,” Dunbar says. “I don’t know if it’s easier for them, or if they don’t want to work as hard. I hope they’re not trying to not work as hard, but it just seems like, ‘If it doesn’t work, we’ll go to urethane.’”
Dunbar expresses hope that USBC’s announced restrictions on urethane usage might swing the pendulum back in a direction in which physical skill, knowledge and, yes, the work those elements demand might eat into the complacency he observes among youth bowlers in his part of the country. He also expresses the kind of demoralization that has set in among parents when he notes that, “I can only speak for youth bowlers in our area, but I’m not optimistic, because I don’t think they want to work.”
Enter Nate Purches, another product of New England and the 2024 Harry Golden PBA Rookie of the Year. He is forcing them to work with his so-called “No-‘Thane” tournament concept.
He ran with the concept, he says, “To see how a pattern would transition, how people would play it, to have more of a test and see, ‘Hey, if we ever have [a urethane ban], what is going to happen?”
Purches hopes no-urethane tournaments provide platforms on which the point can be made that, “Urethane is not a crutch; it’s more of a tool … I honestly enjoyed every minute of it, watching people try different lines, try different balls, and I thought it was a great success.”
Purches’ decision to run a no-urethane tournament derived in part from the very realities Dunbar identifies. Along with his dad Jeff, himself a longtime organizer of youth-bowling events in the area, “One thing we both see around here is that, no matter what the pattern is — it could be 50 feet; it could be 47 feet — we will always see someone with Purple Hammer in-hand.
“I’m not bashing the Purple Hammer at all; it’s a great ball, but what we’re trying to do is eliminate those kinds of balls to get these kids ready for the next step. With all these new USBC rules, the Purple Hammer is banned (except in aforementioned circumstances such as Junior Gold qualifying, the USBC Collegiate regular season, events in which no restrictions will be in place, and other exceptions), the question is, ‘Hey, when we get ready to bowl PBA Jr. events or PBA Regionals, how do we take your game to the next level?’”
PBA Tour lefthanders like Packy Hanrahan and Keven Williams, the latter of whom won his only PBA Tour title with a urethane ball (the 2022 PBA Shark Championship), also see abundant opportunity and need for younger players to think beyond urethane.
Hanrahan, a two-time PBA Tour champion, says Junior Gold hopefuls looking ahead to a 2026 tournament in which urethane is banned after qualifying would be wise to accept that, “Practice is the place where you should be uncomfortable. You should try new things that you’re not good at. A lot of youth bowlers are really good with urethane balls. I’ve always pushed them, ‘Hey, if you can strike 10 times a game with your urethane ball, you probably don’t need to worry about practicing with that one, do you?’ So, maybe you’re bowling on your traditional house shot and we get outside of 5 and try throwing a reactive ball and hit the pocket. Learn how to do different things to expand the tool bag and just get more tools into your arsenal that aren’t ball-related.’ That’s always been my mindset.”
Williams, with whom Hanrahan worked a series of coaching clinics in October, says, “The biggest reason for making [the changes that USBC has implemented] is what the youth look like when you go to events. When you go to a Junior Gold event and there are 10 balls on the rack, eight of them were usually urethane balls — no matter the pattern. I think that was a big reason why they needed to make some changes in the game because, for whatever reason — if urethane was a crutch to some bowlers, or it was taking away from the talent level, or it was changing the lanes too much — the honest truth is that most of the people who will be affected by this are the youth, because they just get so good with urethane balls. At Junior Gold this year, it didn’t matter what the pattern was; everyone was trying to throw urethane.”
As a lefthander, Williams concedes that urethane has been particularly beneficial for bowlers on the portside, and the option continues to be wildly popular — even unavoidable — for them.
“Lefties have to try urethane, even if it’s a pattern that says you can’t throw urethane, you have to try it because, if it works, you can almost be unbeatable,” he says.
Hanrahan adds that, “If you look at all the righties, they use it every block the first two games. The lefties just don’t have the traffic to eventually switch out of it. If the lefties do switch out of it, they do it maybe in Game 6, 7 or 8 — and most of our blocks now on the PBA Tour are six.
“So, we don’t have the amount of bowlers or the transition to actually switch out of it. We end up using it the whole block whereas the righties use it for two games so they don’t give up pins on the fresh. It’s manage the first two games, try and get out of there plus 20 or 30, then take a step to the left and throw it to the little friction to the right and the little hold to the left spot that we have down-lane.”
Essentially, Hanrahan asks those pointing fingers at lefties for their perceived urethane-dependency to do the math.
If right-handers largely toss urethane the first two games of a block, he reasons, "That's two games with five people on every pair and four of them are right-handed. They do the same thing as us; they just have to switch out of it” because of the greater volume of traffic on the right side.
A Game Changer for College Recruiters
For Shannon O’Keefe, who helmed the stout McKendree bowling program with husband Bryan before moving over to the women’s team at Jacksonville State, USBC’s new urethane restrictions likely will change the mindset of college coaches looking to recruit fresh talent.
While women’s competitors are far less affected by urethane restrictions than men — albeit it with the exception of lefthanders among women, who may be more prone to using urethane — O’Keefe avers that, “On the guys’ side of college bowling, urethane has gotten out of hand. It is more like a crutch. If we were still recruiting on the guys’ side of things, I think we most definitely would be looking at how successful kids are when they’re hard without urethane. We look at that on the girls’ side too, you know — you have the much younger ones using urethane, more often than not. We’re already recruiting the class of 2027 and looking ahead to the class of 2028, and if there are kids in those classes who have predominantly found success with urethane, they may not be as attractive to us.”
Julia Bond, the Nebraska assistant coach and PWBA Tour champion who also sees urethane restrictions having an impact on recruiting philosophy going forward, agrees.
“Even if the decisions might not be correct [among college prospects], are we trying different things? Are we trying to think out of the box? Or are we just using the same thing hoping for a different result?”
When it comes time for match play at the 2026 USBC Junior Gold Championships, where urethane will be banned, Bond expresses the hope that she will see “more variation in rotation or hand position. I get it. I was no different as a youth player. You get good at doing what you do and how you do it, and when you get challenged, I see a lot of ball changes being made. Sometimes, that is the solution; I am not going to deny that. As a pro, I do it, too. But there are times when it feels like all the balls are doing the same thing. With these girls coming in [at Nebraska], I’ll kind of just ask them, ‘Can you just get around it? Just a little bit? Just for funsies?’ And they’ll do it, and they’ll see a different motion, and you can kind of see that light bulb go off and they’re like, ‘Oh, I can do that!’ I would like to see a little bit more of that subtlety and finesse.”
The Coaching Gap
For Murray, the erosion of skill urethane has precipitated applies as well to college coaches as it may apply to players at any level of the sport.
“Honestly, some of the coaches at the collegiate level don’t have the coaching ability to adjust for that. I hate to be that way, but [those coaches] are going to struggle to try to bring in 10 guys who have thrown urethane for the past four years who all of a sudden have to figure out how to not do that, and their coaches can’t walk them through that. I think you’re going to see a couple of years of some really mad coaches and some really mad players, but I think that, long-term, you’re going to see more actual skill come back as opposed to relying solely on that crutch that is urethane. You walk into any collegiate tournament these days, and there’s 12 purple urethanes all on the rack at once.”
Which is a phenomenon Purches says he himself has seen and marveled at.
“There are some tournaments in college — and I have seen photos of this — with the entire rack being Purple Hammers. I’ve seen crazy stuff in college, pro and youth, but that was, by far, one of the craziest photos I’ve ever seen.”
Pro Approach
As for how the pros themselves plan to approach events like the 2026 USBC Masters and U.S. Open, where urethane will be prohibited, every pro quoted in this story thus far has expressed an eagerness to embrace the challenge that new landscape presents — be it with different layouts or surfaces, or different bowling balls they expect manufacturers to deliver to the marketplace that will mimic urethane motion without being urethane bowling balls.
“Ball manufacturers will make different types of bowling balls. We’ve seen it from companies already, where they’ve made kind of the non-urethane/urethane-type reaction ball. Moving forward, I think the companies will lean into more of those types of bowling balls,” Williams says.
By and large, though, pros plan to lean into their own skill sets and rely on their own experience, knowledge and instincts in the face of urethane controls in at least those two major-title events.
At the U.S. Open, Troup says, “The get-out-of-jail ball was throw urethane at the pocket, try to bowl 190 to 210 and get some oil down the lane. So, obviously, that’s going to change. For me, I’m going to have to venture out of my typical layouts on resin balls because that’s really the only other option, but they’re going to have to be drilled differently than they have in the past. Personally, I’ve already started working on that. We’re going to start playing around with some different layouts on some balls just to get them to really smooth out.”
Troup adds that, “The other thing to think about is the oil down the lane. I guess Games 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 will look a little bit different on the short as there’s not that massive puddle that urethane left in the hook spot.”
One of the quirkiest adjustments Troup anticipates? Flame-throwing, urethane-loving two-hander Jesper Svensson sending messengers flying with a 180-grit plastic ball.
“I would not be surprised in the slightest,” says a chuckling Troup, one of Svensson’s closest friends.
As for the Masters, Mykel Holliman, a lefthander who finished runner-up in the 2019 event, says that urethane has not been the option in recent Masters events anyway.
“This year at the Masters, lefties didn’t have to throw urethane,” Holliman says. “We were all able to throw reactives, which was good. I just hope USBC keeps making patterns where the lefties have a fighting chance with reactive balls trying to do certain things.
“Everybody knows that the righties eventually will get their own shot,” he adds. “There are so many righties, and good right-handers, who know how to break down patterns.”
Wolfe Wisdom
Which brings us back to the man who, in a very real sense, started it all — Brett Wolfe with that decade-old, mileage-worn Blue Hammer that helped him bank a hundred grand back at the 2002 Masters. These days, he is a 49-year-old eagerly looking forward to becoming eligible to bowl the PBA50 Tour upon turning 50 years old. In the meantime, however, he has retired following 15 years with Edward Jones and offers “about 20 lessons a week” at the B3 Performance training center in Tempe, Arizona, which happens to be run by his brother-in-law and younger sister.
“As the power game has rapidly increased with two-handers and EJs and guys who can really do it, everybody is looking for a way to control the lane down-lane, and the urethane balls would do that,” Wolfe observes.
Now, however, competitors battling environments like Junior Gold match play, where urethane will not be an option, “will have to figure out how short-pin layouts work, and how control layouts work with resin balls.”
In Wolfe’s view, “What’s the point of throwing urethane in qualifying if you’re not going to be able to throw it the next day?”
Wolfe makes the broader point that, “There’s always a shock when something changes. But, when people come in and we have conversations [about developments like urethane restrictions], they understand, ‘Hey, if this is the way it goes, you still can bowl. You still can learn. You just have to be willing to think outside the box a little bit. Don’t always drill super-strong balls.’ I joke that I want to bring in a golf bag and say, ‘This is the average bowler’s golf bag,’ and it’s five drivers and a putter. I tell them, ‘You need to learn to bowl with some other tools. There are balls between urethane and super-resin that can make it work.’ The people who are open to hearing that and listening, they succeed, and they start to be less apprehensive about going away from the Purple, and they say, ‘Hey, let me try some of these other bowling balls.’
“It’s evolve or die,” Wolfe adds. “We drill resin balls, and I have a few that are pretty quiet down-lane resin-wise, and that’s all it is: What are you going to do? You can complain about it and not make any money, or you can learn and evolve.”