Needing a strong performance to give them a shout at a Pan-Am medal, Bermuda's male ten pin bowlers got off to the best possible start yesterday only to fade down the final stretch.

Going into Sunday's play at the Sebelen Bowling Centre in Santo Domingo, Antoine Jones and Steven Riley held down seventh spot with a 2,335 total. Leaders, the USA, had 2,516, second placed Canada 2,446 and third placed Mexico 2,416.

Clearly fired-up for the final six games of 12, the pair opened their account with 232 (Jones) and 213 (Riley) respectively.

Jones' statistics saw him hold down fourth spot in the individual rankings but somewhere along the way the challenge came off the rails and the Islanders came in tenth of 17 teams with a final total of 4,551, Jones finishing 17th and Riley 26th.

The USA and Canada held onto their gold and silver spots, while Colombia moved into the bronze medal position.

“Yesterday (Saturday) was OK, we made a few mistakes. Today we made a few mistakes and got a little bit worse but I don't think the scores indicated how good we bowled,” said Jones, a former Commonwealth Games silver medallist.

“I don't think we bowled terribly but the scores just don't show that. It was just one of those games.”

The turning point as far as Jones was concerned was a 136 in the fourth game yesterday.

“That killed me,” he said with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “You saw the last shot of the tenth frame there - the seven-ten (split). Those are the breaks of the day.”

“But you move on,” he said, denying it affected him mentally. “I just didn't carry what was necessary.”

Riley, meanwhile, described the event as “quite challenging”.

“It's very different from what we are used to competing on,” he said. “It is quite mentally draining. You have to just try and keep yourself in it and make the shots. You really have to make good shots (all the time).

“You can't make three good ones and one bad one. You have to make at least 95 percent of them good to maintain the challenge.”

Riley said if it had not been for a slow start on Saturday he and Jones would have been right up with the leaders.

“We started off slow in the first game yesterday (Saturday),” he said. “The rest of the five games we averaged 200. If we had averaged that in the first game I estimate we would have been second or third.”

“We then got off to a good start today which was our mindset after our meeting last night. We knew we couldn't afford another slow start because we were in contention.

“Then we shifted from one side (of the alley) to the other and when you do that it's almost like going into a different centre.”

Looking ahead to today's individuals, Riley said he felt the experience gained over the past two days would help.

“I think we can do much better. We have had one day on each of the patterns and tomorrow we go back to the short pattern and we did fairly well on that yesterday,” he said. “Antoine has a good shot on the short pattern, myself, I improved over the last four games, so I think we have a good chance.”

Singles action concludes tomorrow evening.