// ARENA NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS
The most grateful curlers at a curling event ... ever!
By Guy Scholz, U.S. Curling News contributor “Tis is not a bonspiel but a championship. A national championship.”
Tis was the opening line at the initial meeting for the first ever USA Arena National Curling Championships on July 17 at the Lutheran Health Sports Center in Fort Wayne, Ind. Te Head Official, Paul Badgero, from Detroit welcomed all the curlers and laid out the necessary evils, or rules of the event. His opening line set the tone. In my head I thought this is my 230th bonspiel, but I now realized I was
stuck on my 229th bonspiel. Tis was my first national championship. Yes, I had been to more than 20 other national championships, but usually seated in Section 313, Row 13, Seat 13 in some NHL or CHL Major Junior Hockey- sized hockey arena in Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Victoria or Hamilton north of the 49th Parallel. Now, don’t get me wrong. My teammates and I were treating this cham-
pionship seriously, almost like a World Curling Tour event in our prepara- tion. Well, as best that a team that played every game of the past season on arena ice could. Our team played in two cities in Colorado. We curled out of the sanctioned Broadmoor CC near Colorado Springs (Monument, Colo.) and the newly forming NoCo Curling Club near Fort Collins, Colo. (Windsor, Colo.). I have curled for a hundred years (slight hyperbole) on some of the best
ice surfaces known on planet Earth. Te 17 curling clubs in and around Calgary, the pristine ice at the Lloydminster CC (one block off the border of Saskatchewan/Alberta), the great ice surfaces at the clubs in Edmonton. Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto, Hamilton, and British Columbia’s best ice at the Golden Ears CC in Maple Ridge (greater Vancouver) that I was privileged to manage, and is the original home of Kelley Law's 2002 Olympic bronze-medal winning team. Te Arena Ice Experience
Let me set the stage for a paragraph or three. Arena ice?? It’s where curl-
ers truly play for love of the game. It’s where curlers humble themselves and know their usual 75-80 percent average will surely drop at least 30 per- cent ... on a good night. It’s where curlers learn to think counter-intuitively. Negative ice is a staple. Trowing a high hard one will usually curl 4-8 feet rather than an inch or two. Where throwing a soſt take out may or may not catch the curl the skip called. Arena ice is where you play to the gouge in the ice and hope to catch it to curl around a guard or drop one in the four- foot. It’s where you hope your rock misses the big water drop on the ice or catches it just right
..depends on the drip. Arena ice, where the best guard is sometimes putting it wide open knowing that no hit in the world will even come close. Arena ice, where hitting the broom is so critical (usually) and where reading ice becomes an art form. A positive: Arena ice players have learned or re-learned the art of read-
ing ice and catching ‘stuff’ quicker than those spoiled on dedicated ice (and rightfully spoiled). I noticed my arena-ice teammates (who had never curled on dedicated ice until Fort Wayne) salivating at the thought of play- ing on dedicated ice aſter watching their million hours of TSN or USCA
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usacurl.org ))
Te Garnet Eckstrand rink of the Kalamazoo Curling Club in Michigan won the men's title at the 2013 Arena National Championships. Team members include (l-r) Chris Gleaton, Marcus Gleaton, Kent Elliott, Garnet Eckstrand, and Tom Deater (not pictured).
website games. How oſten do you hear aſter a game in a dedicated facility, the following
comments I heard in Fort Wayne??? • The rocks curled in both directions … the whole game. • I made every take out tonight, and none in the month of December. • We could actually use corner guards and center guards to create some
offense … and it worked. • Man, I didn’t realize that a wide-open rock in the rings will be hit 97.97
percent of the time when the thrower hits the broom. • The ice speeds tonight stayed the same the whole game and didn’t
change six or eight times. • It was so much fun sweeping tonight knowing it made such a difference. • Is this really what people in Bemidji and St. Paul and Detroit and Madi-
son and Duluth or Superior and Seattle and Chicago and North Dakota and all those clubs in the Great White North play on almost every single night? • I kept thinking my rocks were going to back up and stop curling in the
right direction. It was almost eerie. Te ice reacted like TV events. My first conversation was at that opening meeting with Jeff Heck and
Rob Jennings of the Circle City CC based in Indianapolis. Okay the second conversation, because Rob was from my home province of Saskatchewan and we were both shocked at the Roughriders 5-0 start in CFL action (now 8-1). And Rob telling me he just got back from Yorkton, Saskatchewan, vis- iting relatives, where my parents now live. Te second conversation. Jeff and Rob started talking about the nuances
of arena ice: "We had these real good curlers from the Toronto area come for a visit. Tey threw so well but kept missing and missing. We tried to assure them they were still good curlers. So we said, 'Try this.' We put a rock on the button. A wide open hit, no junk. We knew that regardless of how many
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