'instead of missing' is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it to emphasize that an alternative to something undesirable has occurred. For example, "We were worried about him, but instead of missing his plane, he boarded just in time."
I can use my hands to hit instead of missing pitches.
Instead of missing six weeks -- and possibly the season -- Camby said he would be disappointed if he was not back on the court within the next month.
Instead of missing the first four weeks of the season and 24 games, he will sit out only the first two weeks and 12 games.
Instead of missing at least six to eight weeks -- and possibly the rest of the season -- Camby is expected to be out three to four weeks.
"It takes a very small change in the Apophis orbit to cause it to impact the Earth instead of missing it," Mr. Schweickart said.
If he had played better at the PGA Championship instead of missing the cut, Garcia said, he might have taken last week off.
Today, Strahan said that if the Redskins had made, instead of missed, the last-minute, game-winning field goal they attempted, "it might have set us back a couple of years".
Accuracy deals with the system being able to determine the correct match instead of missed identifications and false positives (incorrect identifications).
The presence of neoplasia in biopsies taken adjacent to visible neoplasia merely reflects the nature of dysplasia associated lesions or masses instead of missed neoplasia.
Yet, the multilevel methods required to achieve this are quite novel and multiple imputation is generally recommended for imputing sporadic missing values instead of systematically missing data.
I guess it would have been slightly more efficient to frame the rule positively and say "hit ball" instead of "avoid missing ball," but then you would lose the mystical Taoist absence-of-an-absence double-negative profundity of "avoid missing".
