Losing 10 - 8: a moral victory!

I made my debut performance as skip last weekend at the Vanastra Curling Club. This is not a position I would ordinarily play because (a) I am a comparative novice, and (b) I am nowhere near as good as the other players on my team; generally speaking, in fact, I'm one of the worst curlers in the club. But for this third draw (set of games) this season, the rules require that the team members rotate through each of the positions, and so I had to take my turn as skip.

To get ready, I wrapped the handle of my brush with orange and red tape to make sure my team members could see where I was placing the broom. (see here for more; my stick handle would be grey, otherwise, because I have pipe insulation on it to keep from hurting my hands when I bear down on the stick -- I'm surprised others don't do this as well.)

I was pretty nervous about skipping for a game, and with good reason. Here is the line score for our 8-end game (we started with the hammer, which makes those scores in the early ends all-the-more impressively bad):

Them 5 1 1 0 0 2 1 0
Us.. 0 0 0 2 3 0 0 3

As you can see, I was really bad for the first few ends. We despaired of ever scoring even one point! But in the fourth end, I made a neato double to score two, and in the fifth end, we all made good shots, including some great draws, to steal three.

If it hadn't been for that truly horrible first end, the game would have been close. And if I had taken the advice of one of the team members in the 7th, we might have scored one or two instead of giving up one when I missed my shot. It was still LOTS of fun, and I got some great help in learning more about ice-reading and strategy from the other members of the team. What a blast!

I'm going to want to do this again sometime....