For Anthony Lavery-Spahr, there’s no better practice than bowling on a walled-up house shot. And he does it four or more times a week to help him stay sharp for PBA events.

Bowling so frequently in leagues is unusual for top-level professional bowlers, Lavery-Spahr said, but it’s the best way he’s found to get competitive practice in when he’s not at PBA events.

He’ll put that practice to work this weekend when he joins a limited field of 32 bowlers for the PBA Grand Casino Hotel and Resort Southwest Invitational, which will be broadcast live on FloBowling on Saturday and Sunday.

Over the past five years, Lavery-Spahr has bowled an average of 530 games per season in United States Bowling Congress certified leagues with a composite average of nearly 236 per game. To put that in perspective, a regular league bowler who bowls one night a week for 36 weeks will bowl 108 games in a season.

“I actually enjoy bowling league because, for me, I like competitive practice,” said Lavery-Spahr, who also bowls hundreds of games every year in tournaments. “I have a really hard time just going up to the bowling center and bowling an hour or hour and a half by myself. For me, it’s not fun, and I get lackluster just throwing shots and not focusing.”

Although he spends most of his time “practicing” on easy league conditions, Lavery-Spahr said he actually finds value in bowling on league shots that can often create a wet dry ball reaction.

“To be honest, nowadays, the way some of the patterns play and the way a lot of the patterns cliff with the high rev rates of the guys, bowling those extra games on the cliffed house shot isn’t that bad of practice,” Lavery-Spahr said. “The way the house shots cliff, a lot of times the patterns we bowl on cliff in a similar way where they get really, really wet dry. There’s been times in some really big tournaments where that has actually helped me out quite a bit.”

Lavery-Spahr has had some success in those big events this season. He finished 10^th at the Barbasol PBA Players Championship and made the cut to the match-play bracket at the USBC Masters.

On the regional level, Lavery-Spahr won the PBA Odessa Southwest Open presented by Brunswick in March. That win came after two missed cuts in Colorado events, something that made Lavery-Spahr reevaluate his game.

“For me, it’s always about timing,” Lavery-Spahr said. “My approach is kind of unique and different. I have a little shuffle step at the end kind of like the two handers do, and I don’t have very high of a backswing. For me, when things get out of time, my shoulders end up really far forward and it just causes me to make really bad shots. When I get into those habits, my feet get fast and a whole array of things start going wrong. I just had to put in some extra time to work on it and get everything back in rhythm.”

Lavery-Spahr hopes that extra work, along with his extensive league play “practice” schedule, will pay off this weekend in Oklahoma with his sixth career regional title.