This is going to be a little bit of a bragging blog post. As most of you probably know, I am in the Curling league at the Utah Olympic Oval. I have talked about curling before. I thought in the future I would do a blog post teaching everyone who reads it a lesson of the rules, and understanding of the game because unfortunately, the United States only really sees curling in two places, the Olympics, and YouTube, since Canada has tons of huge competitions every year, and they post every match, so there are hundreds of videos on YouTube that broadcast the matches in Canada. It's a lot more interesting than you might think, but this isn't the blog I want to do about curling.
The Utah Olympic Oval Curling League has four seasons a year, being Fall, Winter, Spring and, of course, Summer. Each league has eleven weeks in the Fall and Winter, and nine in the Spring and Summer. The reason they are shorter in the warm months is that we share the exact same ice rink that the United States Speed Skating Team uses to practice, and in the spring and summer, they practice a little bit more, and so we don't have as much time on the ice as they do, and rightly so.
We finished up our Winter League last Thursday, the 31st of March, and my team, which I named The Punk Rockers, get it, I love punk rock, and curling stones are also called rocks, won the silver medal, which we won in a blowout match. Here are a picture of my ream, and my medal up close....
So a big curling competition is called a Bonspiel. It derives from the Dutch term meaning "Game", but has come to mean Curling Tournament over the past 75 years. Curling is almost 500 years old, just to give you reference. Anywho, a lot of curling clubs or leagues will host bonspiels throughout the year, and all over the world. In fact, one of my teammates went down to Phoenix, Arizona for a bonspiel a few weeks ago. They are a lot more common in the states that border Canada, but they are all over. In fact there are websites where curling clubs or leagues will post that they are having a bonspiel, and anyone is allowed to enter.
Curling is also a community sport, meaning that we play, we compete, but sportsmanship and kindness is more important. In fact, in bonspiels, whoever wins a game has to buy drinks and/or food as a "Thank You", and it's the most upheld tradition in a bonspiel.
Like I said, bonspiels happen everywhere, and last Friday, April 1st, we hosted a bonspiel at the Utah Olympic Oval named, The Hive. They even made special patches for the tournament for just participating. Here is what ours looked like...
In the Olympics, each match is played over ten rounds and can take up to three hours to play. In the league, we only play six rounds in two and a half hours. That sounds long, but if you are playing, the time flies by. We kept our same curling team that won the league silver medal, and after three games, we were the only team that was undefeated, and we turned a few heads doing it. However, we lost our fourth game, and were eliminated. We were disappointed that we only lost by one point, but we had a great team, and we all worked and played, and had a ton of fun doing it. We actually had 16 teams with four people on each team, and we had people from all over the country and state participate.
What was difficult for us, is we usually only play one game with six rounds each week, and in the bonspiel we played eight round games, and on Saturday, the second of April, we played three games with the eight rounds, and we were tired, but they fed us wonderful sandwiches for lunch in between the first and second game, and then after our third game, we had a big dinner, and then one of the coolest things we did was after the normal games had all been played, we turned off all of the lights because the Oval has cosmic ice skating sometimes, and so the curling sheets we use are painted so that they glow really bright under the black lights, and we had glow in the dark rings that we put around the rock handles, and we did some cosmic curling, just for fun. It was one of the most fun and exciting things I have done in a long time. It was also nice after we lost our final game, that the other team bought us drinks, I had a Coke because I don't drink, but there were also a lot of different alcoholic beverages for everyone old enough to drink, and then we ate dinner with the team that we lost to, and it was like the match didn't even matter. We had a blast, we ate good food with awesome people, and it was a great weekend to remember.
Anywho, I hope you are all happy and safe. I hope that you have things in your life that you participate in that put in situations to have a good time with good friends, or even good strangers, that add a little bit of fun and experience.
Also, now everyone in the league calls me Uncky Nate, so I guess that's the new nickname for me while curling. So, now that it's sticking, here is Uncky Nate signing off.
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