This weekend, my curling club hosted a bonspiel (tournament) for the members. It wasn’t meant to be a true club championship as there was plenty of encouragement to mix experience levels on teams, but there was still seeding for purposes of the early stages. Though I’ve now been a member of the club for a few years, I still don’t have a deep network of connections and so got left out of the early discussions as teams formed. I put myself on the list of people who would like to join a team, but a few weeks out I just assumed that all spots were full and that I’d miss out. I then received an email from someone I didn’t recognize. Upon hearing that there was room for one more team to sign up, this person had taken the initiative to sign up a team consisting of the first four people on the availability list. And just like that, I had a team and was signed up to play in my first bonspiel.
For those who don’t know, the most common form of curling has four-person teams. Each person throws two consecutive stones. I’ve played every position now and was willing to play any position on this team. As we discovered through a bit of email conversation, I was also the only one of the four of us who had ever played skip (the one who throws last and is akin to the team captain). That meant I got the job. Mind you, I’d only played skip in two games prior to the bonspiel, so I was by far the least experienced skip in the 32-team field. We met about 15 minutes before our first game and jumped straight into it after the shortest of talks about how I planned to play defensively so that we’d stay in the game as long as possible and hopefully not get crushed.
We were the lowest seed in our section of the bracket, which gave us a little bonus power up that I successfully used to tie the game after the fifth end (ends are like innings in baseball only there are 8 in curling the way we were playing). That is not where we expected to be. I thought we’d give up 4 or 5 early and be out of it. Even my last rock had a theoretical chance of tying the game, which surprised everyone in the building. The hypothetical hero shot didn’t work and we lost, but it wasn’t a blowout. We’d exceeded my expectations and had our opponents concerned until almost the very end.
Our second game was the most painful. Both of the first two games were against people I play with or against in my regular Monday league, and I’ve actually won the Monday league playing for both of the skips I was now drawn against. In the second game, we were up by four with two ends to play. Then we narrowly missed a few shots, they made some great shots, and I missed a wide open hit at the end by aiming too wide and we lost by one. We had the game won and let it slip through our hands. Even though I’d now only known my teammates for a few hours in total, I felt terrible for having let them down. At some point I’ll watch the film to analyze the game but it’s still too raw.
The third game was more of the same—narrow misses on multiple shots that would have won the game for us and a bad break when one of the other team’s misses resulted in a tremendous outcome for them and multiple points in the end. Again I had a chance with my final rock and again the effort at a hero shot was unsuccessful. No blowouts, but 0-3 nonetheless.
I still haven’t won a game as skip, but that will change in time. Curling is a different game when you play the back end instead of the front end. I’ve now played all four positions enough to at least attest to that. I’ve gotten to the point where strategy comes into play and that makes the game so much more mentally engaging and fun. Now I’ll spend the rest of this season practicing my technique and skills in preparation for taking another step up in competition in the fall. I’ll probably go down a YouTube rabbit hole on strategy and there are even a few books on the subject too. I enjoy the grind of working to achieve more than basic competence at a skill. To go deeper is to be able to appreciate greatness, and I’d like to have more of both greatness and appreciation in my life.
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