Curling with Cornerstone

Yes, we did it. We went curling... a true Canadian experience. A few of us from our Cornerstone Church Thursday Sport Night group went last Saturday. Ken organized an afternoon out at the Richmond Hill Curling Club on Elgin Mills, just east of Yonge. Out of the sixteen of us who went only two had gone before. Jennifer had gone once and Chris twice. The rest of us were neophytes.

A young lady, who mentioned she just recently started curling, was our instructor. She had a us walk on the ice and get used to the feeling of how slippery it was underfoot. She then had us practice pushing off the "hack". It's sort of like the sprinter's blocks that runners use at track meets. You use it to push off of when throwing rocks/stones down the ice. We practiced sweeping with the brooms and she told us about scoring and a few other rules then let us play.

I have to say, the most difficult part was judging the correct draw weight. In other words, trying to figure out how heavy to throw the rock down the ice. More often than not, we threw it either too hard or too soft. It was tough getting it anywhere near the button (the circle in the middle of the house/scoring rings).

The second most difficult thing was getting the stones to go straight. It was sort of like bowling. If you were a little bit off-line at the beginning it just got worse as the rock slid down the ice. If it touched the black lines on the side it was deemed out of bounds and taken out of play.

Sweeping was a lot more physically demanding than most of us imagined too. You really have to sweep hard and fast when trying to get the stones to slide further. Especially if someone threw too lightly. You could burn yourself out pretty quickly sweeping vigorously trying to get it to go past the "hog line". That's a line 10 metres from the end of the ice that the stone must pass to remain in play.

Needless to say we were all pretty crappy at first. We did improve slightly after awhile. But, we have a long way to go to to even achieve mediocrity. Still it was fun. I know we all enjoyed ourselves.

After the game we headed over to the nearby Kelsey's on Elgin Mills, just east of Leslie where we had dinner and watched the pro's put on a show at the Tim Horton's Brier (Canadian Championships) on TSN (The Sports Network).