This Is Guernsey

By Matt Lihou

Bowls Guernsey executive officer Garry Collins watches as Alison Merrien logs onto www.bowlsguernsey.com. (Picture by Steve Sarre, 0604578)

GUERNSEY bowls now has its first official website. Set up by Garry Collins, the executive officer of Bowls Guernsey, www.bowlsguernsey.com includes information on all international caps, as well as past results from various competitions.

The idea to set up the website came to Collins after the two individual bowls clubs combined four years ago.

‘After we formed in 2004, I felt it would be good to have a website to keep people up to date. However, time constraints restricted me, so it has only materialised now,’ he said. Guernsey’s top bowler Alison Merrien, who is a current two-time world champion, thinks that the website is good for people wanting to get involved with the game and also for existing bowlers.

‘Anyone who wants to know anything about how to get started in the game has all the contacts that they need. Also, for people like me who are already bowling regularly, it gives us information on when matches are being played and our latest results,’ she said.

As the statistics on the new site show, Merrien is the most capped women’s player, while her husband Ian is the most capped overall with 88 internationals under his belt since 2004.

The site also contains links to all of the other three bowling clubs in the island and includes past results from their competitions as well as information about their history and personnel.

Collins said that some of the records and stats were not as easy to get as others.

‘For some of it, the results were impossible to get hold of, so I had to get all of the trophies down and make lists from those.

‘I must have spent about 200 hours over the past 18 months to make this new website,’ he said.

Article posted on 11th July, 2008 - 2.29pm