A New Brier Format, Residency Rules and burning Mike Fournier in Effigy

It seems everybody and their dog is giving their opinion on the format of the Brier (and the Scotties), and the impending debate on residency rules.

For those not in the loop on this – here are the issues:

The Brier used to be about representing your Province at the national championship. The Brier has a rich tradition of pomp and pageantry that seemed to draw curling fans and viewers like no other event. It was the ultimate curling experience – it dwarfed the World Championship.

Then the Olympics came to curling. At first, the curling world did not change much. Mike Harris was the first team to go in 1998, and the qualifying process was basically just another bonspiel. You had to win a qualifying event to get to the Olympic Trials – but the teams remained Regional/Provincial.

At around the same time, around the early 2000s, the emergence of pro curlers came about. The best teams in the country decided that the Canadian Curling Association was keeping too much of the spoils of running the Brier, and decided to form their own pro tour and boycott the Brier. They got fledgling Sportsnet on Board, and found enough sponsors to run a Grand Slam of Curling. This was the beginning of the notion that there could be pro curlers. The boycott lasted a few years, and eventually was resolved – but the Brier and the game would no longer be the same.

The big prize became the Olympics. This was the new gold standard of curling – the new goal of serious teams. And from this emerged the notion that the best teams should not be bound by provincial borders. If your goal was to play on the pro tour and represent Canada (not your Province), then why should you be limited in playing with guys from your province?

This trend has continued and evolved until today, where the top 5-6 teams in men’s curling and the top 3-4 teams in women’s curling are essentially pro curlers, and not always from the same province.

From East to West: Gushue, Epping, Jacobs, McEwen, Koe, Jones, Homan, Fleury and Einerson.

These are pro teams. Yes, you can argue that a few other teams should be on the list. And yes, I am sure that a few of the players on these teams have day jobs. But for the most part – these are pro curlers. If they need to make a team change, they will not seek out the next best player in their home province, they will look for the best player in the country.

Example, when Rachel Homan’s 2^nd left the team a few years back, she went and got super-sweeper Joanne Countney from Alberta to play 2^nd. She did not pick the best player in Ontario, she picked the next best player in Canada.

But while the Pro-Teams have evolved, the rest of us have struggled to keep up. The rest of the curling world continued to play, but opportunities to do so have dwindled. The Slams are an exclusive club; they only invite pro teams to play, plus International Olympic Teams and maybe a couple of other spots to fill out the field. The big cashspiels of old have died off, with only a handful of events remaining.

And what has happened to the Brier? The only way to get to a Brier is still through the provinces. So the pro teams need to playdown just like the rest of us. They have to beat the local amateur teams. 

The Brier (and the Scotties) accommodated the pro teams by allowing one “import” player not from your province. The other 3 players have to be residents of the province they play in. This goes against the idea of finding the best 4 players available, which is why the top teams are pressuring Curling Canada to drop the residency rule altogether.

This has also created some heartburn on the women’s side at Ontario Provincials a few weeks ago, where Rachel Homan got booed and sarcastically nominated for the Sportsmanship award because some say her team violates the residency rule. (Rachel Lives out West, but still plays out of Ontario because of a rule in Ontario that allows you to play for your Province when you are attending school in another province). So despite 2 players on her team “living” in Alberta, she plays out of Ontario. I can see why some teams might be annoyed, but she has to play somewhere! And the idea of Rachel in an Alberta jacket just seems wrong to me.

All this to say this is getting complicated.

So here is the conflict. The Brier (and Scotties) is our National Championship. It is supposed to determine the best team in the country. However, to get there, we still have a structure that is based on Provincial qualification, (with rules that vary by province) and require you to pick players from that given province.

The fear is that if we give up the notion of provinces, we give up what makes the Brier special. Yet if we hold on too tightly to the notion of provinces, we risk making the Brier a 2^nd class event.

All of this raises a number of existential questions, and the answers lie at the core of finding a way forward:

• What makes the Brier magical? What makes it so special?  
• Do fans need to see the best curlers, or do they want to see their province represented?
• What do we do with the “Fringe” provinces (like PEI, and the Territories), where only a handful of teams are even signing up? Do they “deserve” a spot at our National Championship?
• If we started over with a blank piece of paper – how would we do this?

So here is my proposed Brier:

First, let’s start with what we need:

• We need to have the best teams there. A “Tier-2” Brier just will not sell. If we exclude the Pro teams – the Brier is lost.
• We need to have some notion of Provincial / Territorial / Regional representation.
• I think we need to make it somewhat fair from a qualification standpoint. I think one of the biggest problems with the current Brier is the fact that qualifying is unbelievably hard in some provinces/territories and painfully easy in others. This has always been the case, and for sure it is one of the weaknesses of the Brier. It means that you sometimes have mediocre teams at our National championship, and this is not in anyone’s best interest. There is nothing magical about a team that you know will go 0-11 before the week starts.

So here is The Mike Fournier Solution:

12 Teams (screw the pool format):

1.      The 4 top teams in Canada – CTRS – as of January 1^st. No residency rules required for these spots. Just 4 players from anywhere in Canada.

2.      7 Regional/Provincial Spots:  Ontario, Man/Sask, Alberta, BC, The North (NWT, YK, NU), QC + NB, The Coast (Nfld, NS, PEI). (same residency rules as today – 3 from the same province + 1 import allowed)

3.      Team Canada -defending champs (no residency rule)

Is this perfect – hell no.

It gives up on the idea of Provincial representation, which kills me.

But I think the ship has already sailed on this one. Provinces just do not mean as much, and at least this addresses one of the big problems: the fact that there is such a monumental disparity between provinces.

As a purist I detest the idea that 4 teams get to go without winning their spot at a Provincial – but the fact is we need to have the best teams in the country there. Look at this year: either Epping or Bottcher will not be there, while there will be a team from Nunavut that would likely not be above .500 in an Ottawa men’s league. As a fan, this makes no sense.

I think there are two principles that we need to hold above all else when qualifying teams for the National Championship:

1.         The Brier needs to be open to all. You need to be able to sign up, pay your $300 entry, and somebody, somewhere has to beat you for you NOT to go. The fact is – for all the “Joe” teams in Canada, the Brier is the ultimate goal. We need to be able to get there or we will stop playing.
2.       It needs to be hard to get there. Being in the Top 4 CTRS is damn hard. You need to devote your life to curling. As far as I am concerned, Top 4 means you have earned your spot. And the regions I have defined above would all be very hard to win. There would be no weak teams at the Brier, and every part of the country would be represented.

My solution meets these 2 criteria.

The purists reading this are surely going crazy by now, burning Mike Fournier voodoo dolls in effigy – and trust me I feel your pain. Those who know me know that I love the game, and I am a purist at heart. I cherish my Purple Heart - and what it took to earn it. I love the way the game was, and I am not convinced the way it has evolved is “better”. I railed against relegation, and shudder at the idea of removing residency rules.

But guys – I think the train has left the station; the writing is on the wall. The game has changed – and I am afraid that if the Brier continues trying to please everyone it will end up as an irrelevant 2^nd cousin to the Canada Cup, or even worse an 8^th Slam that nobody gives a shit about.

Other Good things that might come from this:

•       It would help get participation back up in the provinces that have a pro team or 2, like Alberta. It has to be pretty discouraging to know that you live in a province where you need to beat Koe to get to the Brier. Look at what has happened to participation in Newfoundland now that Gushue has not been in their provs. for the last 2 years – they actually have teams signing up!
•       It will make the weaker provinces better. In the East, it will make the Regional events into a big deal – and likely big enough events to hold in arenas –as opposed to a curling club. It will be more competitive, and the team that comes out of it will be more battle-tested. (BTW this is clearly not-in my self-interest - as my road to the Brier will now include beating the best from NB - but I still think it makes for a better event.)
•       It gets rid of the painful 2 pools system at the Brier
•       It pretty much solves the residency debate.

Anyway – let the debate begin.

Grumpy Post-Provincials Blog

So a couple of weeks have passed since the Quebec Provincial Curling Championship…so I guess it’s time to come out from my cave and start blogging again!

Quebec Men’s Provincials

Argh. That sucked.

We lost the Provincial Final to Martin Crete on an agonizingly good shot: a 4 foot angle tap to the pin. I keep seeing it playing over like an ever-repeating GIF in my brain. It haunts my dreams. It still hurts. My second says he has PTSD.

Of course congrats to Martin and team and all that. Quebec will be well-represented at the Brier in Brandon in March (*he begrudgingly mumbled halfheartedly).  But damn, I just wanted it to be me.

Unfortunately, as a Tier 2 team, our season is now O-V-E-R. We could not find a spiel to play in if we tried. I looked on the World Curling Tour website for possible events between now and the end of the season – and all I found was the Red Square classic in Moscow. Seriously. Moscow. The prize money is paid in Kompromat, and 2^nd place is a month in Siberia.

   

Of course the Slam Teams will play in a number of Slams before and after the Brier, further distancing themselves in terms of points and experience from the rest of us mortals, but for us it’s already golf season. It’s -17 with 50 cm of snow on the ground, but it’s golf season.

So if we actually want to curl, we either need to play in the Mixed or the Mixed Doubles, play in some late season drinking-spiels or just start practicing for next September. Damn. I miss curling already.

I think I need to organize a giant cash spiel this time of the year for all the teams that are not at the Brier and who don’t want to stop curling in January. I will put that on my to-do list for next season.

Quebec Women’s Provincials

I have to admit I was a bit dismayed watching the Quebec Scotties this year, which was going on at the same time as the Quebec Men’s provincials in Grand-Mere.

What the heck has happened to women’s curling in Quebec? There were all of five teams competing for the right to represent Quebec at The Scotties. Five. And guess what: 2 of the teams were junior teams!

The Quebec Scotties Final this year featured 2 junior teams, and not even the best junior team. Gabrielle Lavoie defeated Emilia Gagné in the final – and I wish them well at the Scotties. Both of these teams are very dedicated junior teams. Laurie St-Georges meanwhile won the Junior Championship, and was busy during Quebec Provincials playing at Junior Nationals. So Quebec is (again) sending its 2^nd best junior team to the Scotties.  

With all due respect to these teams – I know that they work very hard to be as good as they are - but they are junior teams. They are young, dedicated and enthusiastic – but have all the weaknesses that junior teams typically have.

So what the hell happened to anyone over the age of 21? I know women who curl. I know lots of them. I know lots of them that would likely have beaten the teams that won. But for some reason they CHOSE not to sign up.

Amélie Blais had a serious women’s team this year – but they had a bad week. They are arguably the only women’s team in Quebec that actually practiced and played – and even then their schedule seemed rather light for what they hoped to accomplish. Verreault and Perron rounded out the field – I love both of these teams but I am not sure either is really putting in the time and effort required to take a serious run at the Scotties.

So what happened? How can we fix this?

The first step in solving a problem is usually to understand it. Why are so few women signing up to play competitively?

Some theories:

·        The “Pro” teams like Homan, Jones and Einerson have gotten so good that it discourages the Tier 2 women’s teams from signing up to go get pounded on National TV at the Scotties.

·        There are not enough Women’s events within a reasonable distance of Montreal/Quebec to allow the teams to even conceive playing a schedule that would allow them to be good enough.

·        Women in Quebec just don’t like curling anymore. (I hope it’s not the case!)

I don’t portend to know the answers. I must admit it is weird that there are still a pile of Men’s teams that would give their left nut for the chance of playing in a Brier (and I am one of them), yet the idea of playing in a Scotties is so uninspiring that we can’t get more than a couple of teams to even try out! I think the problem is worse here in Quebec, as most other provinces still have actual playdowns to get to provincials. In Quebec you just sign up to go to Provincials – and even if you don’t sign up Curling Quebec might call you to play to fill the draw!

So here are some solutions:

-         Let’s fund a Quebec Women’s Curling Tour. I think there might be some money left from when we hosted the Scotties in a Women’s curling development fund – or maybe we can convince some corporate benefactor to throw a few bucks at this. But there needs to be something – a series of events – a tour – a carrot – that can provide some competition and get more people into the game.

-        20 Years ago – we used to have the Montreal Open – a big spiel that brought the best women curlers in the country here. Let’s do it again.

-         Let’s offer coaching to any women’s team looking to get better. Curling Quebec can do some matchmaking here – but let’s offer mentorship to teams that want help. And not just technical coaching – but coaching from teams/players that understand competition – and can help them build a plan and a schedule to reach their goals.

-         To all the women who have proudly represented us at the Scotties in the past– I issue you this challenge: Get involved in this. The sport has given you a lot – it is time to give back. I am not going to name names – but I seem to remember during the Scotties in Montreal  a herd of 40 or 50 Blue-jacket wearing women that showed up for the Thursday night draw. You all should be involved in this. Get to work. If you don’t want to play anymore, then get involved in coaching – or helping to run a women’s event at your club.

Anybody else have any ideas? Or do we just shrug our shoulders and hope that the next generation of junior teams will save us from the current sad state of women’s curling in Quebec. 

Welcome to the World Canada Grand Slam Tim Hortons’ Home Hardware Tankard Cup Scotties Championship Classic

Some random venting…

Welcome to the World Canada Grand Slam Tim Hortons’ Home Hardware Tankard Cup Scotties Championship Classic

Okay – let me preface this by saying that I love curling. I love playing in big tournaments, and I love watching the game on TV.

My question is – have we gone around the bend in terms of the number of “big” event tournaments? Have we gotten to the point where we are losing the impact by burning out both the fans and the players?

This weekend, there was the Canada Cup. At the same time, there is World Cup of Curling. Next week – there is a Slam in Conception Bay Newfoundland. As a curling fan, what am I supposed to care about? What does it all mean? At what point do fans start to say: really? Another event? Why should I care about this one?

Pros vs. Joes

Much of the answer lies in the fact that there are about a dozen teams in the world right now that are Professional Curlers. Let’s call them the Pros. There are 6 or 7 of these teams in Canada, the rest are Olympic-funded athletes from Europe, the US or Asia.

The life of a professional curler is not easy. While you do not have to worry about such petty concerns as a day job, you spend your time traveling from event to event. Yes you sometimes get a week off – but not often. You find yourself on a flight from Esteban Saskatchewan or Omaha, Nebraska to Conception Bay, Newfoundland. That can’t be a fun commute. You need to be at the gym and on the practice ice in your spare time. And the payout is not spectacular.  If you are one of the top few teams in the World, yes you likely are pulling down some decent money – but definitely not “pro-sports” level money. And if you do not win, the money dries up pretty quickly.

The Grand Slam events, of which there are now seven (!), are catered to these teams. The schedule usually is set up to be pretty light and run from Wednesday to Sunday– with a game or two per day for 3-4 days followed by playoffs on the weekend. The Slams are a pretty restricted circle, because only the top teams in the world are invited, and only the top teams in the World make the big points and the big money that these Slams provide. Few new teams can break into the invite list. Usually you see the one or two “non-Pro” teams that have curled in EVERTHING and played really well get an invite somewhere (like Scott MacDonald this week). But otherwise, the same teams will play in all the slams.

The Pros ultimately are aiming at the Olympics, which are the new pinnacle of the sport. Since curling has been included in the winter Olympics, the focus of the best curlers has been to bring home the Olympic Gold. The “system” is set up to help the pros attain this goal. Teams are no longer set up to last one or two seasons - they talk about committing for the "quadrennial".
The Slams give them a platform so that they can curl full time, Curling Canada and the Canadian Olympic Program do their part by providing additional tax-free subsidies and training support to the top teams.

The other group of curlers are the Joes, of which I am a member. You can call us the wannabees, or the dreamers, or the silent majority. We are the teams that fill the spiels every other weekend. We have day jobs, and are usually burning through precious vacation days to play in spiels. I do not mean to ennoble us, or say that we are the true heart of curling or any bullshit like that, but we are the base of the pyramid.

Joes grind it out. We drive to spiels. We fit practice time into our days. Tournaments usually run Friday-Sunday, with a much more compressed schedule. In spiels, we often end up playing 3 games per day, including the last day of a spiel where they usually fit quarters/semis and finals in the same 12 hours.

For us Joes, there is no financial incentive. Sponsorship is haphazard and minimal, so travel costs often have to be funded by our winnings. For most teams, break-even is a pretty good season. So why do we do it?

The Brier

The Brier is the likely the one remaining event that is attainable for both Pros and Joes. If you are fortunate enough to live in a Province without a “Pro” team, (like Quebec), then the best Joe team will go to the Brier and compete on TV with the best of the best, like I was fortunate enough to do last year. While the Joe teams rarely have a shot at winning (arguably no Joe team has won since Ménard 13 years ago), the Brier is still enough to fuel our passion for the game and to keep us curling. The Brier is the ultimate open. If you have the $300 or so to sign up, you have a shot. Someone has to beat you for you to not go.

This is what makes the Brier stand out. While literally every single other big event is structured to favor the Pro teams, the Brier is a democracy. It is the ultimate open bonspiel. I can win the Brier. I realize that this is unlikely, but while I might have a 1 in 1000 shot at winning the Brier, I have a zero in 1000 shot at winning a Slam, because I am not invited, nor can I possibly hold down a job and a family and curl enough in Tier 2 events to make enough points to possibly, one day, squeak into a Slam.

This brings me to the Brier format. John Morris wrote an excellent article in the Curling News this month about the Brier and suggested formats, and surprisingly I find myself agreeing with a lot of what he said. Some highlights:

•      NO wildcard
•      A full round robin
•         Only 1 team from the “North”.
•      Team Canada
•      Better “perks” like a players/family lounge

He has some other thoughts that I am less sure about, like eliminating Northern Ontario or dropping the last place team from the following year, but I like the direction of his thinking.

The Brier needs to be different. The Brier is not a Slam. If there is one event that needs to cater to the Joes more than the Pros – it’s the Brier. It needs to be an accessible dream. I would argue that the very survival of the Brier depends on Curling Canada realizing this.

Regular readers of my blog know that I see the death of “Joes”-level curling as a bad thing. To me, a lot of the charm of curling was that it was a game played by Joes. The guy who won the Brier often had a day job. Curling was a game, not a job. I am now a relic in thinking that this was good thing. The Olympics have moved the game into the realm of Pro Sports, with sponsorship and TV deals and contracts (and even our own pro-sports bad behavior scandals - see Red Deer).

But has it made curling better? Of course it has. The quality of play is not even comparable. (If you don’t believe me – go back and watch a Brier final on Youtube from the late 90s. It looks nothing like the game today). But is “Curling” better? Meh. Not so sure.

Don’t get me wrong here folks. Please do not say I am against the Pro teams, or that I am anti-progress. I swear I am not. I am just trying to take a step back and ask what progress really looks like. Where do we want to the game to go?

I also hope I am not the only guy asking these questions!

There is Drinking in Curling! I Am Shocked!

If you have not yet heard, curling made the news this week for the wrong reasons:
Jamie Koe, and a pickup team made up of Ryan Fry, DJ Kidby and Chris Shille were ejected from a WCT event in Red Deer over the weekend for unsportsmanlike behavior.

Curling Team Ejected

You can read the articles on this, so I won't re-tell the story. And I was not there.
But from what I understand, they (and I don't think it was the entire team) behaved really badly on the ice, smashing and breaking brooms, then damaged the locker room. They were all pretty drunk at the time.

So I certainly did not want to be writing on this topic - but I am at a work conference today and I have already been asked about it by non-curlers about a million times already. So first of all - thanks for that guys. You have now made it tougher for every team looking for sponsors across the country to convince people that curling weekend are not drunken escapes from our wives.

This is definitely not the kind of attention that our sport needs.

But I am pretty sure they are getting an earful from just about everybody in the curling world today - so I will hold back from further criticism.

But I will talk a bit about drinking and fun in curling.

So here is the deal. Curling is a sport that has often been associated with drinking. And I certainly grew up in that generation.

So full disclosure:

I have gotten drunk at so many bonspiels, I can't even begin to count. I typically have not curled drunk very often (mainly because I am not very good at it). And I have curled hungover, in more important games than I would like to admit.

But when I started curling in the late eighties, that was what EVERYONE did. We drank. We partied. We did stupid stuff. The best teams in the world were doing it. Ed Werenich, Paul Gowsell, Hackner. They all drank and partied until the weee hours of the morning, then got up and curled. And usually curled pretty well.

In Quebec we had the Buckingham guys, who were half in the bag or hungover while playing at Provincials to go to the Brier, let alone a weekend cashspiel. And they won. A lot. When we played, our team physician/therapist was Doctor Bacardi  - he could cure all ills.

But somewhere along the way that changed. It seems to coincide with the notion that curling is an Olympic pursuit and not just a game. It coincides with the notion of "professional" curlers, or guys who now make their living curling.  It coincides with the emergence of coaching, because it is hard to convince your coach that you are mentally preparing for a game when you are really trying to focus on not throwing up. It coincides with binge-drinking becoming far less socially acceptable than it was 20-30 years ago.

Somewhere along the way, the teams that drank their way to success faded away, and were replaced by teams that would have a protein shake instead of a beer before the game. They were replaced by early morning visits to the gym, instead of the floor of the hotel room bathroom.

I look back and wonder why we did it. I think part of it was the lack of coaching. The fact is, one of the most important secrets to the higher levels of curling is to learn how to "turn your brain off", in other words, how to not overthink your delivery. Coaches work hard with teams teaching them this point.  The way we used to do this was by occupying the right side of your brain with the task of holding down your breakfast. So we drank. We drank to forget, and to exorcise the demons that haunt you after a game. And we drank to make sure we were not thinking about being nervous. And we drank because it was fun.

Now most of the great drinking of the past is long gone from the game, relegated to end of season drinking spiels like the Glenmore Intermediate, the Kenogami spring tournament and countless other relatively meaningless but immensely fun events across the country where drinking still plays a big role in curling.

But there are throwbacks. Jamie Koe is a throwback to another generation. He drinks. And plays. And plays well.
Jamie and Chris Shille played me last year at the Brier in the "placement game" which was relatively meaningless but was still televised on TSN.
I don't think they slept much the night before, and I am pretty confident that they did not have any water in their water bottles.
But we had a fun game, and they out-curled the shit out of my sober team.
(you can actually watch a replay of the game on Youtube, in case you want to watch some drunk guys beat the crap out of us:  Fournier vs. Koe Brier 2018). Jamie and Chris did not miss many.

I have hung out with Jamie at spiels before, and they have made a career out of being not only good on the ice, but great at the bar. And nobody loves curling more than Jamie Koe. He is a popular draw at charity spiels, and readily gives his time to a number of causes.

So Jamie signed up to play at the Red Deer Classic, which seems to be a Tier 2- level curling tournament. It is not a drinking spiel. This was a real event, with sponsors and volunteers and teams competing. And like most spiels, Jamie did what Jamie does: drink.
But I have a tough time seeing Jamie as being "unsportsmanlike". Drunk yes, unsportsmanlike no.

Make no mistake, this team did not get kicked out of the tournament for being drunk. Jamie is drunk at most spiels he plays, and has never gotten kicked out of anywhere. His team got kicked out for being assholes (at least one of them).

The issue by all accounts seems to have been Ryan Fry, who has been known to smash a broom or two while sober. Fry is on a week off from Team Jacobs, who are between 2 Grand Slam Events. So he likely signed on to spare with Jamie, thinking it would be a fun week of a more casual style of curling. Ooops. Ryan apparently behaved badly, both on and off the ice.

By all accounts, Fry seems to know how bad he screwed up, and this will more than likely end up being a trans-formative experience for the guy. I am not saying he will find Jesus or join AA, but I think you have to take a hard look at yourself in the mirror when you get kicked out of a bonspiel for being an asshole. His apology on Twitter today seems contrite. And I wish him the best. We have all screwed up at times, this occasion is just a bit more public than most.

As for Jamie, he is one of the true characters of the game I love, it would be a shame if this tarnishes his image as a lovable and highly-skilled party animal. I doubt it will.



My lead, JF Trepanier, made a great point this weekend - before we even knew about the whole Koe-Fry thing, and I think it is especially relevant today:
As competitive curlers, we owe a debt to the game. The Game gives us a lot: it gives us fun and excitement and the chance to have fans actually cheer for what we do. Sometimes it even gives us money. What a privilege.

But the trade-off is that we have to make it fun for the fans to watch as well.
We have to make the people watching the game love curling as much as we do. We do that as much with how we act on the ice as we do with our curling ability - if not more so.
This is why a Guy Hemmings was always so popular with the fans. You did not just watch him play, you shared in his joy of curling.

I think this is a good thing to keep in mind for the uber-serious competitive teams of today, and especially for Ryan Fry.

***

So in less exciting news, Team Fournier had a good weekend in Halifax - losing in the Semis to eventual winner Scott Howard.

The spiel itself was awesome. This was the inaugural Stu Sells 1824 Halifax Classic, and we definitely plan on returning. The hospitality was typically Maritime, the ice was flawless and the party was a blast. The curling world needs more events like this. Big thanks to the organizers - and to Stu Stankey, who is now sponsoring some of the best events in the country.

We are now off to Charlevoix this weekend, one of my favorite places in curling despite how it has treated me in the past, and usually on my birthday no less.

Winning isn't everything - or is it?

So this has been bugging me for a while. This will be a curling and non-curling post – as a few events in my life seem to be hitting on this this point lately - so forgive me for venting a bit.

So my son plays house league hockey. He is pretty good for house league – he scores a lot and is fun to watch. He has no allusions of being a professional hockey player, but he genuinely loves the game. He tapes and re-tapes his stick before every game. He looks at standings from his league on-line (probably instead of doing homework). This year he is playing Bantam B. In house-league hockey – there are two levels – A and B. The better/bigger kids play in A. The smaller or less-skilled players play in B.

So this year my son got put in B. Fine. He will enjoy it, he will score a bunch of goals.

But predictably, the league in which he plays, like a lot of kid’s sports, was affected by parents and politics. Somehow – the league decided it was better to load up and stack the A teams with 17-18 players and leave my son’s team undermanned with 12. Strange. Also, the balancing of the teams was horribly biased, and seems to have resulted in my son’s team getting the short end of the stick.

But what disappointed me the most is the obsession people seem to have to win at all costs, vs. the notion of playing in leagues that are well balanced with players of equal abilities. If your goal is to produce young athletes that enjoy the game, should we not be obsessed with making the games fun for all, not just the team that wins the trophy at the end of the year? 

So now let me bring this back to curling.

I read an article by the excellent Devin Heroux on the CBC site where he interviewed Mark Kennedy, who has switched from a playing to a role in Curling Canada’s high-performance development team.

Mark basically said in the interview, that he thought it was unpatriotic for Canadian coaches to be doing such a good job at making other teams from around the world better. We should instead keep our knowledge of high performance curling secret, presumably so that we can win more.

I love Mark – have always been a big fan, but Ugh - what a misguided thing to say! I was dumbfounded that a curler in Canada, especially one who has won a gold medal, would say something like that.

Is winning more important than developing the sport we love around the world? 

Would a gold medal mean as much to us if it was easier – because the rest of the world failed to get better?

To me, it comes down to the scourge of winning.

Let me make this clear: I play sports, and I love sports. I play golf, soccer and curling a lot. And I hate to lose at any of them. Every time I step on a field/rink/course I really, REALLY hate to lose. To quote Billy Bean of Moneyball fame: “I hate losing more than I like winning.” 

But here is the thing, for there to be sports, someone has to lose. 

And for it to matter to anyone - the fans or the players, the outcome of the game can't be predetermined. For every winner, there is a loser.

For kids, sports is an awesome learning experience. But that experience is not all about winning, or stacking your team so that it’s easy. Winning builds confidence, but losing builds character.

If we make it all about winning all the time, and if it’s the same team or guys that win all the time, the losers will start staying home. I think this is part of why the majority of kids (not all but the majority) seem to lose interest and stop playing team sports as they get older. The fact is – out of a league of 10 teams, only one team will win in the end.

To bring it back to curling, if Canada wins every Olympics easily, then why should other countries play? Would we care as much? Would it be as interesting? I don't think so.

Anyway, this is just me venting. My son will likely enjoy his season anyway, and I am hoping his team will use the whole biased balancing process as a motivation to have a Vegas Golden Knights kind of year. If they win, he will build his confidence, if they lose he will build character. 

And I’m pretty sure that Canadian curling coaches will not be turning down lucrative coaching contracts from outside of Canada because Mark doesn’t think it’s a good idea.

But please if you are involved in sports at any level, let’s always remember the bigger picture and not get all hung up on who gets to bring home the trophy at the end of the season. It's bigger than that.

Venting Over.

:-)

***

So we are off to Halifax this weekend to play the Stu Sells 1824 classic. Should be a fun weekend, with Gushue, Howard and Murphy in the field! We get to fly to a spiel – which is a big deal for us. We have decided to not take chances with Felix this time after he lost his luggage and our rock book heading to the Brier last year, so Felix will be dressed in full curling gear on the plane, and we are making him travel in Will’s carry-on luggage just to be safe.

We were asked to do a promotional video for the event – you can see it later today on our team Facebook page (Team Fournier Facebook page )in case you want to see what I have to endure every game from my front end.

So my team spent last weekend with a coach. We have decided to spend less of our time running ourselves ragged on the bonspiel circuit and a bit more time in weekends like the past one – spending some time as team getting better on the warm side of the glass.

Our new coach this year is Felix’s Dad, Ben Forget who coached his team throughout juniors. But for this past weekend, Ben brought in super-coach Bill Tschirhart to work with us, all the way from Victoria, BC. Bill was great, his insight into the game and what it takes to perform at a high-level felt like exactly what our team needed at this point in time. Hopefully it will pay off on the ice. I will not reveal any of the top-secret tips and tools he gave us!

All of this has made me reflect on just how far curling has come in terms of adopting coaching and sports psychology since I curled as a junior a million years ago.

When I was in juniors, our coach was actually a guy we would ask to pick up beer for us if our game was going to go past the time when the Dépanneurs stopped selling beer (11PM) in Quebec. Coaching was very limited, and our coach at the time likely knew nothing more about shot selection or strategy than we did. While our coaches were well meaning chaperones who did their best to help us succeed, but there was nowhere near the level of support and materials available as there are today.

Once I made it to men’s, the very notion of having a team coach seemed ludicrous.
I still remember the story Ed Werenich bringing a “coach” to the 88 Olympic Tryouts: a buxom blond that they had met at a strip bar before the event. Real curlers did not need coaches! When we had a bad game, the last thing we would want to do was actually talk about it. It was off to the bar!!! Our team actually had a sports psychologist: Doctor Bacardi.

Yes, some of the best teams had coaches even back then, but not many. Good coaches were few and far between. As a result, I think the curling world was generally more mentally fragile than today. Guys who were mentally good were often people who came from other sports; golf pros are well represented among the curling elite, as they likely had to develop some notion of visualization, and dealing with clutch situations to excel at their sport. They could then transpose this to their curling game.

But boy the game has changed on this front. I had the chance to catch up with my old lead and current super-coach Dan Rafael, who is now coaching in the Chinese high-performance program (along with Mike Harris and a heard of other Canadians). Wayne Middaugh, Glenn Howard, Marcel Roque have all taken positions as international team coaches or advisers. These kind of jobs just did not exist 25 years ago.

This has changed the game so much. The notion of sports psychology has been a revolution. I have played a number of sports in my life, but in terms of the psychology and mental discipline required to play at a high level, curling is second to none. Coaching has helped teams deal with this better. Young teams look more experienced and disciplined at a younger age. 

So at some point, much later in my curling career, I of course realized that maybe I did have something to learn from a coach, and I learned just how naïve I was to have thought that I did not need one. It is no coincidence that my best years of curling have occurred pretty much at the same time as I started working with Michel St-Onge. Sure I learned and developed a lot by myself, but so much of managing team dynamics, of mental discipline, of smart practice, of building the right routines comes from working with coaches.

I am fortunate to be playing with Will Dion, who comes to curling via the world of University Football. Football is one of the most tightly coached and strategically analyzed games on the planet, and Will has very much tried to bring this into our curling team, and keeps telling us how much we have to learn from the football mentality of analyzing every situation in minute detail. I believe him.


So if you want to get better: get a coach!
(this blog post is clearly meant as a way of paving the way my next career as a deluxe curling coach!)

A-qualified and not hungover? What have I become?

So here is a rare treat.

We are mid-spiel, playing in the Challenge de Gatineau and I find myself with some time on my hands. And not because we exited early - we uncharacteristically qualified early on the A-side with 3 wins and find ourselves with a day off while we await the quarterfinals Sunday morning.

For my readers who are not familiar with cashspiel formats, most tournaments are a triple knockout. So you keep playing until you lose 3 games or win enough to qualify. Winning early means you get to have a day off while you wait for the other teams to play each other into exhaustion until late Saturday night. That is our usual path to qualification. But this year we get a break - and you get a blog!

In my younger days - such a break would have meant a debauched night of questionable beverage and moral choices, followed by a day of sunglasses-wearing recovery with no curling. But that was the younger Mike. The wiser, older Mike grabbed a lift home to spend a bonus day with the kids. Boring yes - and I have a feeling my team spent last night treating young Felix to some of Gatineau's finest local entertainment, but alas that is a story for another day.

And that means I find my self with time to write a blog!

So what is up with our team this year? So far the season is going pretty well. We qualified a couple of weeks ago in Toronto at a big spiel, and then lost a quarterfinal on a wicky-ticky uncalled double raise takeout for 3. Not sure what we did to anger the Gods of Curling, but clearly they were not pleased with us that game. But a great spiel all in all, we beat one of the hottest teams in Canada -  Brendon Bottcher along the way, and got some solid learning on how to play the new 5-rock rule.

For those of you not familiar with the 5 rock rule - the rules have again changed so that you cannot remove a guard for the first 5 rocks of an end (it used to be 4 until this year, except at the Grand Slam events). It was our first time playing against big teams with the new rule.

I was surprised at just how much it changes the strategy of the game. Because you cannot peel as easily, you find yourself defending a lead by playing offense. Strategically, it felt like I was driving  a car with one foot on the gas and one foot on the breaks - and I was pressing both at the same time. We gave a clinic on how to not play the 5-rock rule in an 8th-end loss to Epping. John was nice enough to give us a lesson on how to score a 4 in the last end! Thanks John!

Most interesting thing about the 5-rock rule is actually not the 8th end, but the 7th. under the old rule, when you were up 2 (or more) playing the 7th end, you would just hit everything in sight and give up no more than 2. The other team was pretty much all-in to score a 2 or more. But now, the better option for a team down 2 is to either take 3 or blank. So if the end starts to look bad - teams will shift to blanking to keep last rock in 8 to score a 3. Taking 2 is the 3rd choice! So if you leave a team with 1 rock in the rings - some teams will likely PEEL THEIR OWN rock and blank the end. Weird. I am not sure we are there yet - but it is fun to have to think about strategy and end-games again.

Highlight of the Toronto spiel:
Between our games, Felix is standing just off the ice watching John Shuster (the US Olympic Team and Gold Medallist) playing against Bob Desjardins. As the game ended, Shuster walked off the ice, saw Felix watching the game, took the used pad off his broom and threw it to Felix while saying "here ya go, kid", Mean Joe Green Coke commercial-style as a souvenir.
(For those of you who don't get the reference, this was a famous commercial from the 70's. Here is the link: Mean Joe Green Coke commercial)
Felix then goes to get changed into his curling clothes in the locker room, and of course sets up next to Shuster to change.
Very disappointed that Felix did not ask him to autograph the pad.


Story Telling:

So I have been blogging about curling here for over 8 years, since 2010. I started doing it mainly for myself, as some sort of outlet that was read by a handful of friends and family. But the other reason was to tell stories about curling. My frustration living in Quebec is that you could not read anything about curling. Newspapers (for you younger readers, newspapers were collections of stories printed on paper and delivered to your house every day!) would not publish anything about curling, and there were no good on-line sources to find out what was going on.
That is why the logo for my blog is still Kermit the frog as a REPORTER.

So 122 blogs and nine years later, what has changed? Well newspapers have died, and so too has any semblance of local reporting or coverage.
But Curling Media has grown a lot.

Former Quebec Champ Dean Gemmell ran a Podcast before anyone really knew what a podcast was - where he interviewed curlers.

But now that podcasting is more mainstream, there are a number of excellent podcasts, reporters and writers that interview the top curlers in the country every week:

• 2 Girls and a Game, From the Hack, Stone and Straw do a great job of not only reporting curling news, but also providing actual insightful interviews with curlers.
• Devin Heroux from CBC Sports is a curling Twitter monster - he tweets more than I have thoughts.
• And I just discovered The Lazy Handle Youtube channel (this is my new favorite thing) run by a 13-year oldish girl named Katerina, who understands curling way better than most adult fans. Here is a link. The Lazy Handle Show
• Brian Chick is about to publish a book of interviews with curling legends from years past.
• And there is always the Curling News (which occasionally picks up my blogs!), a curling newspaper most often found lying around at your local Curling Club run by former Olympic Curler George Karrys.

(Apologies to those I have not mentioned.)

But I feel like the story-telling part of curling is actually in pretty good shape, and getting stronger every week.

Possibly my favorite part of curling over my career has been the stories. Curling is a game that lends itself to epic shots and games, ridiculous travel adventures and general craziness that had to be lived to be believed. The game has always been popular because of the characters that have graced the ice; from Werenich to Ryan to Gowsell to Gervais to Howard to Hackner to Martin to Hemmings to Jones to Jones to Darte to Shmirler. But without the storytellers, this rich history will fade, and will only be known to a few insiders.

So keep up the good work podcasters, bloggers, Youtubers and reporters. Curling needs YOU!