The Cracked Bell (Our Inaugural Bonspiel)

M, Troy, Christa and I participated in our first Bonspiel this weekend. The event was held at the Philadelphia Curling Club which is our home club. We were pretty much destroyed this weekend. But since we have about 3 months of total curling experience I think we did pretty well.

Our first event was Friday night. At first we were all a little bit excited because we realized that the team we were playing was a family consisting of a 12 year old, 2 college age girls and a father. Being new to the club we figured that this was a family out to have fun and we would at least be able to hold our own......

It turns out that the Father is the coach of the Club Juniors teams and his daughters have all been to or are starting to go to Nationals. Needless to say we got our stones handed to us. The final score was 17 to 2. But as a team we choose to look on the bright side of this. 1. We scored 2 points against a very good team who throughout the rest of the weekend made a number of very good shots and ended up finishing 3rd in the event. 2. We actually got out on the ice and made a great effort to learn the sport knowing we probably wouldn't do that well.

Each match we learned a bit more, scoring a few more points and allowing other teams to score less. We played 2 more games that weekend (each team entering is guaranteed 3 matches). And curled against 2 other clubs which was great because it also let us see the other side to club curling, which is the social side. We kept asking for advice and taking that advice to heart.

By the end of the weekend we had a chance to finally combine our lessons learned in our first Novice league game as a team. Again we scored more points and allowed our competition to score less. Still loosing, due in part to the fact that we were all pretty tired from having curled all weekend.

So we are off to Schenectady in a few weeks and that will be in interesting event. I am sure the out come will be similar. One of the best things about or team is the attitude we take with us. We would all love to win and eventually we will probably take a game or two. But until then we need to learn as much as possible and get as much practice as possible. Oh, and have more fun than anyone else there!