We’ve all been there. You’ve gotten the nursing staff together to form a Wednesday night bowling team. The hard part was getting Nancy, Deb, and Jules to clear their schedules. The easy part should be coming up with a team name for your ragtag bunch of misfits. But after several hours of brainstorming, it turns out that wasn’t the easy part at all.

Oh, you could just name your team after your workplace, or be the Bears or the Tigers and go on with your lives, but that’s not remotely clever, funny, or crude. In today’s world of intramural, co-ed, and rec-league sports teams, everyone has to have the upper hand in team name. That way, if you wind up sucking horribly, at least you have a funny name to fall back on and let everyone know you never intended to win and were just in it to have fun.

Naturally, puns are excellent places to start. What are some of the things you use in bowling? There’s the ball, pins, lane, shoes, ball return, and scoreboard. You could also look to use bowling terms like strike, spare, gutter, split, foul, or even turkey. There’s a full list of terms here, and many are probably way too obscure for anyone else to get.

Before you start spitballing with one of the terms, think about the direction you want to go. Do you want to inspire terror and fear in the other teams with an intimidating team name? Do you want to play the sexual innuendo card like so many teams do? Do you want it to be self-deprecating? Toilet humor? Pop culture reference? Just a plain clever play on words?

Say you want to go the toilet humor route, a classic approach. Think of bowling terms that sound like bathroom terms. You could be the Toilet Bowls! Or Bowl Movement. Or Get Your Mind Out of the Gutter. Or just something childish like the Pee Pee Pins, or the 7-10 Split Buttcheeks.

If you’re drawing a blank, consider a different approach, like rhyming. For the word “spare”, you could look up a list of rhyming words. Bear, prayer, hair, bare, rare, care. Now think of interesting phrases where you could flip the word “spare” with a rhyming word. Livin’ on a Spare. Spare Spray. Sparenaked Ladies. Tender Loving Spare. The Berenstain Spares. Eau Spare, Wisconsin.

Still stuck? It doesn’t have to be a bowling pun or play on a bowling word. What best symbolizes you and your teammates? Are you all nurses who like to swim? You could be the Wet Nurses! Are you all best friends from church who like to tinker with cars? Be God’s Rods! Are you just four friends who like to drink way too much beer? Just call yourselves the Alcoballics. Use your imagination!

Another fun idea might be to take the first letter of each of your names and see if it spells anything. Naturally, someone has to be a vowel. You’ve got Greg, Louis, Dickie, and OJ. You could rearrange the letters to spell GOLD. And then you could be something like Good as G-O-L-D, or go way off course and be the Tracey GOLD Fan Club! Lame? Maybe, but you’ve come this far, just pick something and start practicing.

Once you’ve landed on the greatest team name, you can further illustrate your cleverness with a custom designed team logo. Find a kid who knows Photoshop to come up with something clever for you to print on your shirts.

Essential Bowling Products… Once You’ve Named the Team

Brunswick TZone 16 lbs. Bowling Ball	Dexter Pro Am II Bowling Shoes	Hilton Retro Bowling Cruiser Shirt
From $56.75	From $59.95	From $27.91

My Hot Take:
I don’t know if it was truly original, but Bowl Movement was my idea for a company team name. I even designed the logo myself and made it available for purchase on Cafe Press. I forgot all about it and looked a few years later and saw I’d made $74 on commissions from a bunch of sales! We sucked as a team. In 8 games I bet one time someone broke 160. But we had fun and we mocked ourselves with our team name.

tl;dr
Pick a bowling team name that has meaning to you or is a play on words.