Hanging Out with the California Men's Team

While in Mankato for the Curling Club Nationals, Vice and I met several teams including the men's team from Orange County.  They asked if they could check out the St. Paul Curling Club and we were able to get some ice time before their flight home.  We split up into teams (Vice and I were on different teams too).  They had gone winless at the Club Nationals, but after that game, two of them got to say that won a curling game in Minnesota.  Tooting my own horn here (isn't that the point of writing a blog?), but I was on the winning team and the game wasn't even close. 

Of course, we didn't really follow rules officially.  They were all kind of sore (physically, but maybe emotionally too) from a week's worth of competitive curling.  Because of that, we (both teams) constantly rotated positions so that there wasn't just one player constantly sweeping.

Random things I learned after the game:
-The skip for the Alaska men's team at Club Nationals is 18 and took off a semester in high school for curling.  He's one of the top juniors, but none of us can imagine taking off from school for curling.
-At Club Nationals, all the teams trade pins with each other.  Kind of a fun tradition.  Two of the California guys bought pins from SPCC.  I didn't even know I could buy pins at SPCC.
-One of the guys had the Asham Carbon Fiber broom with the Boomerang Grooved Pad (earlier discussed here).  That might have been my first time holding a Carbon Fiber broom because I was surprised by how light it was.  I guess I have no idea if it made his sweeping better, but the broom certainly looked cool.
-It's difficult to run a curling club (some of them are on the board).  There's ice time and getting players and holding clinics and all that.  So I guess I want to say help out your curling club as much as you can, but get out of the way too so that things get done.

Arnold Asham on the Curling Show

I'd like to highlight another episode of Dean Gemmell's Curling Show that I just listened to, which featured Arnold Asham.  For those that don't know, he's the founder of Asham, one of the big curling equipment suppliers.  Now, I'm not always up to date on the new curling technology, but I'm kind of intrigued with two of the new broom features discussed on the show:

The Boomerang Shaped Brush

Kind of a weird idea, right?  Most brooms today have a rectangular brush head (like mine) or an oval shape (like my teammates').  The boomerang kinda makes sense though; the diagonal parts should make it easier to brush debris and frost to the sides.
 
The Grooved Brush Head

Such a simple idea.  When you're sweeping, frost accumulates more on the edges of your brush head.  Why not make a brush head with more edges?  And it doesn't really cost all that much more for the grooves compared to the flat ($2 more). 

So I just added a boomerang broom with the grooves to my wishlist.  It costs $166, $100 more than my first broom, but I think I'm ready for something new when next season comes around.