Wnning our first event

Well it was bound to happen some time!!! Mary and I won our first in Curling. The Bonspiel was our club in-house annual "Mushroom" event. We started off witha fairly goos team. Myself and Mary bot 2 year Curlers. Our Vice was Eric who has curled for 6 years and our Skip was Ken who has also been curling for 2 years but has picked up the sport rapidly. Unfortunately due to circumstances within reach of our skip he was not about to make the first game so we had a different Ken sub for us as Vice. We created a pretty simple strategy and executed well. We ended up winning our first game, and event in and of its self since Mary and I hadn't won a Bonspeil game yet. Our egos slightly boosted we headed into Saturday evening's game with high hopes.

Those hopes were dashed late in the game, but we didn't give up game 2 without a fight. We ended up making a few execution errors in the 6th and 7th end that we just weren't able to recover from. But it was great to know a team of relativly novice player could hold their own again some of the more experienced curlers of the club. We had a feeling we would give the next team a good game had we won, but we would certainly get blown out in the first event finals had we made it that far. Losing this game dropped us into the 3rd event, which we were happy to play in.

Finally Finals Sunday had arrived. We only had to play one game (they used a points scheme to determine the winner of the 3rd event). However we were playing the Fishers and their experienced front end. The game was shapping up well. We managed to score points in the first 2 ends. The 3rd end we made some near fatal mistakes. Starting with a guard of mine going to deep which lead to an open double that Christa made easily. With not many guards and teh back unds up the takeout game began and at the end of it we had given up 4!... The game was close again and there were only a few ends left in the is abbreviated game. However we were able to regain our composure and take the rest of the ends as well.

Mary and I were particularly on for this game almost every time Mary needed to throw a guard it ended up in the right spot. All of my draws were exactly in the right spot I managed to throw a couple of stones that froze to Troy's stone which had stopped just behind the button. From here we could guard our point and take the end. As I mentioned the only time this didn't work we gave up 4 points.

We ended the game with a points total of 23 which would be hard to beat. Fortunately for us the team on the next sheet had the exact score, but their opponent had managed to take one more end leaving them with 21 points. All we could do now was watch the second set of games and hope that there were no blow outs. The curling god were smiling upon us that day as one game ended close and the other ended in a tie. 23 points became the magic number and we walked away with the 3rd event.

The big problem with winning is now we feel like we have to keep it up. I have the Dykes (5 and under Men's tournament) coming up next week. Lets see if I can keep a winning streak alive. The team we have assemebled is all 1 and 2 year curlers, we aren't expecting to compete but who knows. Perhaps we can get a victory or two under our belt.

Finally, following our stellar performance at the Cracked Bell (yes that was sarcastic). Actually we did fairly okay. We didn't win anything, but we seemed to "loose" less. And there were points in most games when we could have taken ends had we executed better. So CPK will hopefully be looking to attend a bonspeil at the end of the season to see if perhaps we can win a game or two.