Curling Match 1 (Mens League)
8:30PM on Sheet 2. After briefly being introduced to my teammates and a few ineffectual words of reassurance, we stepped out onto the ice and shook hands. One player said the leads do the coin toss and handed me a quarter. We lost the toss, so I was told to pick our color (the coin toss winner gets the strategic benefit of choosing whether they want the hammer first…the loser gets the cosmetic benefit of the prettiest color). I choose blue, they chose to take the hammer, next thing I know I’m standing at the hack for the first time in 6 months trying to simultaneously recall the delivery procedure and watch the skip’s ice call.
We got killed. I think it was 13-3 when we stopped counting after the 7th end (of 8 ). To be honest, the score doesn’t accurately reflect the way we played. Basically, some missed clutch shots allowed the other team to pick up 5 points here and there that could just as easily have been 1 or 2 for us.
Personally, I did better than I expected. In the training classes, I felt lucky if I got a stone to stay in play. Most shots went too far or not far enough. Of 16 stones thrown, I think 12 or 13 of them at least stayed in play. Of course only 2 or 3 of those wound up anywhere near their intended goals. I suppose that’s the next step.
Sweeping is definitely hard work and had me huffing and puffing on a few occasions. Hopefully doing this 3 times a week will help me lose some weight One nice thing is that it isn’t constant sprinting and stopping. Sometimes you have some hard stones and sometimes you get to rest for awhile.
Knowing your skip’s voice is an important skill. There were a few occasions where sweepers did the wrong thing because they either heard the another skip’s command or ignored our skip’s command thinking it came from the other skip. Another time, I thought why skip had called me to take out an opposing rock. To confirm, I called down “Take it out?” and heard both a “Yes” and “Draw weight,” which I believed meant to hit the other stone, but not too hard. Turns out the “yes” came from the other sheet - I was supposed to hook my stone in BEHIND the existing one. To further confound things, my stone actually did hit the other stone and knock it aside!
Thursday night kicks off the beginners league. I’ll try and hit the broom once or twice this time.