We ask which hand before we ask anything else.
Customized Bowling Shirts makes cut-panel two-tone league shirts, chain-stitched name shirts, wicking performance builds, embroidered team and sponsor shirts, womens and youth fits and ongoing league programmes — every shirt built to the hand that throws.
A bowling shirt is the only shirt in sport designed around one repeated asymmetric motion. The same arm swings a heavy pendulum, the same way, twenty-odd times a game.
Which means the two halves of the garment are not the same garment. The gusset, the extra back-hem length and the pocket all belong on one particular side, and which side depends on the bowler.
After that, two things decide whether the shirt is any good: whether the contrast panel was cut or printed, and whether shirt thirty-one will match shirt one.
Why we exist
League shirts are ordered from a picture and specified by colour, and the two things that actually decide the result are never on the quote: the handedness and the cloth lot.
Both are settled before anything is cut, and neither is difficult.
Built around one arm
A gusseted armhole on the swing side, and a back hem cut long enough to stay where it was tucked through a full approach.
Get the side wrong and the shirt lifts out of the trousers on every delivery, which no amount of good embroidery fixes.
Nothing proud on the front
On the backswing the ball passes close to the chest on the throwing side.
So the placket is finished flat, and the pocket and any patch go to the other side or are left off. Bowlers who have caught one remember it.
The panel is cut, not printed
A real two-tone shirt is colour-blocked at the seam, with piping laid into the join.
A panel printed onto a finished blank has no seam, no piping and no shadow at the colour change, and from three metres away that reads as fancy dress.
Chain stitch is a different thing
One continuous looped thread that stands off the cloth and follows the curve of a letter, rather than a field of separate stitches lying flat.
It has to be drawn as a single path, so we redraw the script for the stitch free and say when a letterform will knot at name size.
Cloth drifts. Embroidery does not
The thing that defeats a reorder is the dye lot. Poly twill shifts between lots, and two shirts from different lots stand together in a team photo and you can see it.
So a programme reserves yardage from one lot against your roster, and a single replacement shirt is cut from that reserve seasons later.
What we will talk you out of
A printed contrast panel. A mens pattern taken in at the sides and called a womens fit. A sponsor logo with hairline text stitched at chest size. Performance fabric for a house league that meets once a week.
And all-over patterned camp shirts, bowling balls, bags and caps — none of which we make. Each refusal costs an order occasionally and costs trust never.
How we work
ASK
Your colours, your roster, and which hand each bowler throws with.
SPEC
Panels, piping, positions, fits and the cloth lot to reserve.
DRAW
Scripts redrawn for the stitch and marks digitised, free.
MOCK
Free mockup within 24 hours, front and back.
SHIP
About 2 weeks, bagged and labelled by bowler.
Who we serve
Get in touch
Text or call George at (929) 605-4397, or email info@customizedbowlingshirts.com. Free mockups, low minimums, and a lowest-price guarantee.
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