"AFTER WHAT COULD BE CALLED, BY HIS STANDARDS," a slow start to the 2006-07 PBA season, Jason Couch set the pins on fire in January, appearing on TV almost as often as announcers Randy Pedersen and Dave Ryan, winning back-to-back titles and notching a third-place finish. But to get there, he had to exorcise some demons � and fully implement a change in his physical game.

Sure, the first nine events weren�t what anybody would call disastrous (he did have finishes of sixth, seventh and 12th place), but several tournaments in which he didn�t come close to the Round of 32 had him �down� on himself.

Then came the holiday break, and a New Year's resolution: "To be a lot more positive than I was in the first half.� The holidays let him step back and look at past performances. "I realize I might have taken myself out of play by becoming upset at myself.� In the first half, he would sometimes make a bad shot and it would carry over to the next couple of frames. As he says, �Out here, if you give your opponent one or two bad shots, you�re done.�

In that first event after the Christmas breather (the H&R Block Classic in Reno), Couch sailed through qualifying and match play. On the show, he was leading Walter Ray Williams Jr. late in a semi-final match when he went high in the seventh frame. After a strike in the eighth, he made an adjustment, moving in two boards, but tugged the ball and left a split in the ninth, allowing Deadeye to go off for a 15-pin win.

�I knew I made a bad shot, and I knew I paid for my mistake,� Couch reflects. �Normally I would have gotten so down on myself that I would have bowled lousy [the next week].� Instead, he averaged 234 in reaching the Round of 8 in Medford, but lost to Wes Malott.

With renewed faith in both his physical and mental games, he approached the Dick Weber Classic in Fountain Valley, Calif., with an air of confidence unfelt in years. It didn�t hurt that this was to be a retro tournament with a retro pattern, something with which many of the younger players weren�t familiar. �I knew I would have a good ball reaction,� he says. �I told myself to stay focused, stay aggressive, and stay positive � and I just crushed them out of the gate.�

The next event featured a Viper pattern, but it was Couch who bared his fangs, leading the field, and winning his second title in a row. The first few games of qualifying produced a couple of bad breaks and an errant shot or two, but Couch dismissed them, concentrating on staying ahead of the transition � and doing what it took to make his own breaks. �I told myself that no matter what happened in the first part of the week, I was going to stay positive.� And positive he was, scorching the field at a 248 clip.

But the new-and-improved mental game might not have delivered had Couch not perfected a physical change he�d been working on for months. His backswing is among the highest of Tour players, but it had gotten even higher.

He and Randy Stoughton, his coach at the Kegel Training Center, felt that he was bending too much at the waist. The overbending was a reaction to his pushaway, which the coach thought was too far forward. This initiated a chain reaction that ultimately led to a very steep swing, with Couch �releasing the ball into the lane, rather than onto the lane.�

or Couch to open up in the stance, then get the ball into the swing a little earlier. Voila! The swing became freer and shallower, allowing better control, and hence leverage, at the point of release. The ball lands on the lane a foot or so fartherout, something the pair feels is beneficial to the champion�s power game.

Couch spent last summer working on the new set-up, and it took all of that summer (and then some) to really build it into his muscle memory. �After bowling all those years with a certain setup, it takes a long time to learn when you try something drastically different,� he confessed.

Summary: Jason Couch needed both a change in his game, and his attitude, to reclaim his place as one of the most dominant lefties on Tour. He makes a point of putting bad breaks and bad shots behind him quickly, instead concentrating on the task ahead. He also developed a �wide-open� stance to keep the swing from becoming too steep, giving him better control at the point of release.