enlarge Doug Jones/Staff Photographer

The windup: Kenny Sweet wasn’t strong enough to lift a bowling bowl when he started, so …

enlarge Doug Jones/Staff Photographer

The surge: It’s all a matter of putting body weight into the delivery and letting it rip, and then …

enlarge Doug Jones/Staff Photographer

The release: Find the mark … that’s the big thing … find the mark, follow through and watch the pins fall.

enlarge Doug Jones/Staff Photographer

And when the pins fall like they do for Kenny Sweet of Portland, then you’re on your way to being the state bowling champion. Which he is. At 14. With a two-handed delivery that may not be your dad’s way, but works just the same.

PORTLAND — There are two ways to find Kenny Sweet in a bowling alley.

First, and most obvious: Look for a teenager with an unorthodox two-handed style, in which he flings a 15-pound ball down the alley in a manner reminiscent of a harried farmhand heaving a sack of potatoes into the back of an already full pickup truck.

Second, and no less subtle: Watch the pins and look for a wicked hook and a loud explosion.

"The first time I saw him I was like, 'Wow, he's good!'" said Jenna Dionne, a 15-year-old sophomore at Hampden Academy. "If he hits his mark right, it's buried in the pocket. You can't stop him."

Dionne and Sweet, a 14-year-old eighth-grader at Portland's Lincoln Middle School, are Maine's reigning state champions, having won their tournaments last month in Bangor.

Sweet beat a 20-year-old from Lewiston by a single pin over a nine-game series, 1,940-1,939, to become the youngest state champ in tournament history, according to Roger Blackmer, youth director of the Eastern Maine United States Bowling Congress.

"He's a machine," Blackmer said of Sweet. "And he's having fun doing it."

On Sunday at Yankee Lanes, Sweet wrapped up Portland's city youth tournament with a score 10 pins higher than that of his state championship. He averaged 217 over nine games, with a high of 267 and a low of 171.

On the same day in West Babylon, N.Y., a 25-year-old Australian named Jason Belmonte became the first two-handed bowler to win a Professional Bowlers Association Tour title. He did so on ESPN with Sweet watching from Yankee Lanes.

"Whenever he's on TV," Sweet said, "I watch."

Both Sweet and Belmonte, who has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe and has been hailed by some as the savior of pro bowling, learned their style out of necessity. Balls were simply too heavy to lift with one hand when they tried the sport as toddlers.

"It was never taught," said his mother, Debbie Sweet. "It's just his natural way of bowling."

The technique is becoming more popular. Several Europeans use the two-handed style, which generates greater spin, and thus a sharper hook into the pins. Bolivia's national team adopted the approach.

One major difference between Sweet and Belmonte is what they do with their right thumbs. Sweet sticks his thumb into its traditional hole for better control, whereas Belmonte and many other two-handed proponents insert only their index and middle fingers, leaving their thumb outside the ball.

"I've been doing it this way since I can remember," Sweet said. "One-handed, I can't hook the ball. This way I can."

At 9, Kenny won a tournament in Connecticut, beating a 21-year-old in the finals. That same year, he teamed with a 16-year-old girl to win Maine's youth mixed doubles title and also won a state team title with three teenage boys.

Wherever Sweet plays, he tends to draw a crowd of curious onlookers. His address and follow-through look fairly conventional. During his five-step approach, however, his style is anything but.

With his broad-shouldered 5-foot-7 frame carrying 140 pounds, Sweet doesn't look overpowering. But he's agile and strong enough to play middle linebacker in football. He also plays baseball, runs track and throws the shot put.

He addresses the pins with his size 9 bowling shoes angled 45 degrees to the right, his right wrist cocked and his left hand covering one of his three 15-pound strike balls. (He uses a 12-pound plastic ball for spares.)

Stepping forward with his left foot, he begins an increasingly hectic race to the foul line. As he leans forward, the ball draws back near his right hip, both hands still cradling it. The left foot plants like a vaulter's pole, the arms shoot forward, with the left hand pulling across the face of the ball to impart spin and the right coming up through the ball. Sweet's head jerks toward...