Cracked Bell - Round 1
This weekend is the Cracked Bell Bonspiel. Its an open tournament, and we decided it would be a good idea to play in a bonspiel at home before we go traipsing up to Schenectady and end up looking like complete jackasses.
The format involves 16 teams and 3 brackets. Winners stay in their current bracket and losers get bumped down to the next bracket, with the intent being that teams will percolate into the bracket most appropriate to their skill level. Also, all teams pay an entry fee and are promised at least 3 games, so this allows teams that get beat early to still have some good competition.
We dubbed ourselves the Curling Patch Kids. The Schenectady ’spiel marks their centennial, so the theme is “curling through the decades” and we’ll be 80’s-themed.
Our lineup is as follows:
Lead - Mary
Second - X
Vice - Mike
Skip - Troy
Yes, somehow I was elected skip, although as the instigator of this whole strange endeavor I suppose I had it coming. I did at least want to try doing it for more than the 2 ends stretches in the beginners league.
I was REALLY nervous going out there. There is a lot of pressure on the skip - you have to call the shots, AND you have to make the money shots. Also, none of us had played for a few weeks, which is never good. We were playing against a father and his 3 daughters. I had played with him before at some point. He’s a nice guy and also does a lot of coaching and teaching of curling, so he has a lot of great pointers. One of his daughters is 12. The others college aged. We could take these young’uns!
The stakes were VERY high for this match. Never mind getting bumped to the B-level bracket; the loser of the match has to play at 8AM Saturday morning!
So we jumped into the first end with the hammer in our favor, and the opposition quickly got to work jamming up the approach, while I tried to stick to the textbook method of keeping things open. And lo and behold, some good shots came out and we scored a point! Hey, I can actually do this skip thing and not completely screw it up! After this, I was a lot less nervous.
But it was all down hill from there. I think they opted not to kill us, although we screwed ourselves most of the time. In fact, I think we played really well. At the end of the day, we’ve really only been playing ~3 months, so knocking our opponents’ stones into the rings (that seemed to happen a lot) is just going to be a fact of life for awhile! We made a lot of good plays and even scored another point somewhere.
Final score was something like 17-2. We essentially conceded the match when victory became mathematically impossible at 12-2 after the 7th end, but we paid $200 and as I always say - nobody made it to the Olympics by curling LESS. Unless you’re out of time, there’s little to be gained by not playing the 8th end. Also, if you give up after an odd end, you have to push the stones back to the near end of the ice. Why not just play them? The opposing skip, being that he loves to coach and does not get to curl with his daughters too often was happy to go along.
I actually enjoyed skipping enough that I’d happily keep doing it. I definitely miss sweeping, but of course I still get to do that during league play. About the only thing I really dislike about skipping is that you need to keep the pace up. I would love to stare at the stones for a few minutes and really figure out the best shot, but with a target rate of 15 minutes per end, you’ve got less than 2 minutes per stone and the stone takes 20 - 30 seconds to travel down the ice. You have to try to bank the time so that you have some leeway when you REALLY need to think about a tough or critical shot.
Coming off the ice, people seemed impressed both that we had the guts as newbies to come put our heads on the chopping block, and that we managed to score 2 on our opponents. It was revealed to us that the older girls compete at the national level and the younger one is just starting down a similar path. These folks have won the Silver Mushroom bonspiel multiple times! We didn’t stand a chance…we held our own against fierce competition.
And one day, maybe those girls will go on to Olympics or world championships and we’ll be able to tell everyone how we got beat by them in the first game of our first bonspiel.
And now we have to get up at 6:30 so I’m going to sleep.