Olympic Curling Class Week 1

I've had a great evening, so far! I just got back from week one of the Olympic Curling Class offered by the Utica Curling Club. I made brief mention of the class in my last Curling post.

About forty eight people signed up for the class, and it looked like about forty actually showed up. The first part of the class was a brief lecture, with slide-show, demonstrating the proper mechanics of throwing a curling rock. That lasted about twenty minutes, and then they actually let us onto the ice to do more practical work, actually pushing out of the hack, and throwing some real rocks. It was not unlike last week's open house, but they went into greater detail with respect to proper mechanics.

By the end of last week's open house, I was doing pretty well throwing rocks, but tonight, it was as if I had never done it before. The twelve rocks I threw last week just weren't enough to develop any muscle memory, but after a bit of practice, I got back to where I was.

We were broken into four-person teams, and after practicing throwing, and sweeping, we played a quick one-end game against a team of all left-handers! It shouldn't surprise you that the game ended in a 0-0 tie. The good news is that each team was actually able to get one rock into play. None actually made it into the house (my two rocks were heavy), but each team did have one guard over the second Hog-Line.

Clearly we all have much work to do, but it was a lot of fun, and I look forward to the next two classes.