Curlers Care Jr Ambassadors Team Veronica Bernard Win Consolation at Galt
We played in the Orion U18 Slam event, October 27 – 29,2017 at the Galt Country Club.
We had some interesting ice conditions on Friday, when the Galt Country Club was experiencing problems with their ice-making equipment. The system thought the ice temperature was normal, when it was actually much warmer than it should have been. This caused the ice surface to become very slippery, and made throwing draw weight extremely difficult. Luckily, the ice-maker at Galt was able to get things under control by Saturday morning, so the rest of the event was played under the typically good conditions. Friday night’s game was quite the adventure, though…
Our first game was Friday morning, against a young team from Kitchener-Waterloo. We adapted to the quickly changing ice conditions and came out on top with a 7-4 win.
Our second game was against a team from Toronto who we haven’t played before. The ice was getting really bad by this time, and we had to throw the rocks almost as hard as we could just to get them down the ice. We were tied 4-4 in the final end, and made a draw on our last shot to steal the win 5-4.
The third game was against a team from Seaforth. We stuck to our game plan and outplayed them, winning 5-3.The final round-robin game was against a team from Niagara Falls, with three Provincial champions. We haven’t had much luck against this team in the past, but we brought our ‘A’ game out for this one, and won 11-7.
Our 4-0 record had us as the only undefeated team through the round-robin pool play, and we went into the quarter finals as the #1 seed. This brought us a match up against a tie-breaker winner, which turned out to be the team we played Saturday night.
Our semifinal game was against a team from Coldwater. We went into the game intending to play an open style, with lots of hitting and few rocks in play. This style of game generally works very well for us. However, this team was able to keep up with us, and even though we patiently waited for them to make some mistakes, they refused to cooperate. We were down one point playing the final end and looking pretty good, when their skip made a great shot to finish us off. We lost the game 4-2, and headed to the Consolation game.
The semifinal losers at the Slam Series events play a final Consolation game. This was our second time landing in the Consolation game, and were not happy to be there. It’s always hard to refocus after a tough loss and come out fighting again. We discussed the attitude that championship teams have, and agreed that it’s “Let’s get out there and win this game!” We dominated the Consolation game and won 7-1.
All-in-all, another great event. We were able to carry forward some momentum from our last event, and we picked up some valuable experience around the mental toughness aspect of the sport. Bouncing back after a tough loss, and dealing with frustrating ice conditions that were out of our control. All great things we can now take with us as we work towards our season goal of getting the chance to represent Ontario at the Canadian U18 Championship.
Our next event is in two weeks, at the Orillia Curling Club, for the Pegasus U18 Slam. Until then we’ll be hitting the ice to fine tune some technical details and catching up on some school work!