Tonight was the first night of the Friday night mini-league, which Karly and I managed to sign up for in the 3 1/2 minutes it took to fill up, as well as signing up Adam, Matt, and Johnny. While I brought the camera, I was too busy skipping to take any pictures. (For the uninitiated, the skip throws the last stone and controls the team strategy — kind of the team captain. Also, the skip doesn’t have to sweep. You can bet I volunteered for that position right away.)
As it was a mini-league, we started by doing some drills under the instruction of a number of club veterans, many of whom had competed at the national level. I still throw too hard, but apparently it’s good takeout weight! After we warmed up and got a better feel for how to throw, we played a mini-game of only 3 ends. (A standard game is 8 ends — 10 in the olympics.)
My randomly assigned team (which included none of the people I came with) managed to beat the other randomly assigned team (which didn’t include anyone I know either). I’d like to say it was because of the brilliant strategy I had, but really, since my strategy was tightly coupled with what the experienced instructors were telling me to do and since none of the shots were going where I placed them, it was more luck than anything else.
Still, I had a blast, and am looking forward to next week. Oh, and also tomorrow when Forrest and I go to the learn-to-curl event. Can one overload on curling? I don’t think so.
Also, as a public service announcement (mostly to the google bots that come by here more frequently than real readers), the Scottosphere has been moved to scottosphere.org from its previous URL. It seems Johnston’s old domain expired without warning and was immediately snapped up by a spammer. (I’ll not mention the old domain name in order to prevent the spammer from getting extra attention.)