FEATURE STORY //
rocks they threw, the best guard was having it sit on the button because it was virtually impossible to hit without a flukey tap-back or raise. They threw soft take outs, peel take outs, hack weight, draw tap back, a freeze for second shot. Both turns. Against the turns. Nothing!!!" Te Wrestler; Te Figure Skater & Car Racer
How to put a team together to medal at the Arena Nationals? Meet my
bronze-medal curlers from Colorado. My brain said we shouldn’t have a chance. Aren’t you supposed to have players with a minimum of 10 years’ experience with a minimum of at least 500 games under their belts? What’s that Malcolm Gladwell rule about the 10,000 hours? I mean, we were going to face some high-level players. Curlers such as the Dallas CC’s Nick Myers, who was a Club Nationals champ and attendee of a handful of USA men’s Nationals. Man, does he throw a nice stone. And, one of the last guys to ever skip a team with Kevin Martin on it. Yes,
that Kevin Martin. Garnet Eckstrand from the Kalamazoo CC via Sedg- wick and Edmonton, Alberta. Eckstrand and his crew of Kent Elliott and the Minnnesota-born sweeping tandem of Marcus and Chris Gleaton. They were fun to watch. Garnet is an Alberta Zone Playdown and WCT veteran. Shortly after winning their gold medal, Mr. Martin, the defending Olympic champion, texted the word "congratulations" to the team. But for the record they beat my Colorado Springs crew by about 2 inches ... two lousy inches! Speaking of that… Long Island’s Dannie Steski via Winnpeg, who has a number of USA
Nationals on his résumé, humbled me with a great line after our loss to Kalamazoo. Steski came up to me and said, “I heard you screwed up against Eckstrand; you freakin’ screwed up.” I was about to go through my ‘curling excuse rolodex’ in my head and finally admitted, “Yes, Mr. Blue Bomber fan, I screwed up but not as bad as that 52-0 beating my Riders did to your Bombers last year.” Steski laughed then and offered to buy me a cool re- freshment, and it wasn’t Long Island Iced Tea. And this is just the short list of the quality of players with a long curl-
ing history who participated at this event. But in saying that, I was really impressed with the quality of players who have only curled on arena ice and have only a handful of years’ experience. Kudos to the fourth-place team from the San Francisco Bay Area CC (skipped by David Wiesen) that probably only had about 16 years of collective curling experience between them; who knocked off the gold medalists in the A-Final qualifying game, dropping Kalamazoo down to the B-side before winning their way back into the final four. Going into the Arena Nationals my head said my Colorado rink shouldn’t
have a chance but my heart said two things, “This is curling and you always have a chance, AND these are three of the best athletes I have ever been thrown together with, who have a genuine love for the game.” I have always believed that curling competiveness can be accelerated if
you can recruit high-level athletes from other sports who are willing to practice and study the game. This was a chance to test one of my many sports theories. Our lead, Nate Mascarenas, from Windsor, Colo., is a former feather-
weight NCAA wrestler, with a grand total of 25 games under his belt. Mas- carenas and his brother went to the Olympics in 2002 in Utah and fell in love with the granite game. The easiest tickets they could get were curling. Initially, they were slightly disappointed, but by the end of the Games they wanted to join a curling club. Both engineers by trade, they Googled the Internet to build their own half-size backyard rink and made half-sized ce- ment curling rocks with Teflon under the running surface. Think northern climate jam-can curling for the first 10 years of throwing rocks, and this was hit and miss. But Nate would study the game on the Internet. Last year
Te Darcy Ellarby rink of the Dakota Curling Club in Minnesota won the women's title at the 2013 Arena National Championships. Team members include (l-r) Julie Wennberg, Robyn Farm, Jennifer Witschen, Darcy Ellarby, and Beth Lundquist.
he was one of the first people in the Fort Collins area to sign up at the new NoCo curling league. The man can sweep and comes out so darn straight you’d think he’d been curling most of his life. It was so nice to curl with seven or eight rocks an end rather than four or five. He understood the lead position and played it so well. Our second man, Gord Harrison, is a professional figure skater and in-
structor who introduced curling to the arena he works at near Fort Collins. Harrison has qualified for oodles of Canadian nationals in figure skating. He is an outstanding figure skating teacher and understands the principles behind trying to win within the strengths a person or team has. He wound up joining Disney on Ice where he meet my vice skip's daughter, Shelby Lyons, who had finished in the Top 10 at Worlds a number of times in pairs. Harrison threw a few rocks in British Columbia, where he is from, and had a pretty good awareness of the game because of living in Canadian arenas while growing up and competing all across Canada. Harrison, the Yoda of positive thinking, had about 75 games on his résumé. And being someone who probably spent more time on ice than in tennis shoes, he had no trouble getting a balanced slide and getting his footwork down for sweeping. Our third man, Kevin Lyons, is from Oswego, N.Y., near Buffalo. He grew
up on CBC and TSN and loved to watch curling, Hockey Night in Canada and the CFL, but there were no curling clubs in his area at that time, and he then moved to Colorado. Lyons was a life-long fan with a wish to play the game. Three years ago he took up the sport and being his nature studied it to the nth degree. I thought I watched a lot of curling on the Internet until I met Kevin. Lyons has a grand total of 75 games on his résumé as well, but is the consummate student. He credits his smooth delivery and under- standing of the nuances to studying "Between the Sheets," that critically acclaimed curling book that has run the circuit the last few years (shameless backdoor plug). Lyons was a successful race car driver (supermodified class) in the Midwest and New York state. He also is an outstanding softball player who lived at tournaments every weekend a few years back. He has the savvy of a Paul Gowsell or should I say a 1970s Bruce Roberts. I have never met a newbie player who had such an unbelievable grasp of the strategic nuances of curling, only having played on arena ice. He understands the concept of Continued on next page *
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