LSG and Growing Up McCarville

LSG! LSG! LSG!

I’m a bit sleep deprived this week watching my friends, Laurie St-Georges and Team Quebec, kicking some butt at the Scotties. 

I watched LSG shoot the lights out last night against B.C., after watching her shoot the lights out the previous night against Kaitlyn Lawes. And it looks like her game against Nova Scotia on Thursday night will again force me to stay too late at a curling club after my own league game to watch.

I am usually a big Russ Howard fan, but he keeps talking about how Laurie is such an underdog since her team has only played in four cashspiels this year. Yes that is true, but Laurie eats, sleeps, drinks and poops curling. She practices more than anyone I know and she plays a ton of mixed doubles. Oh, and she won the Canadian Mixed this year (with Emily of course, who also plays mixed doubles).

I saw her team playing in a number of spiels, and often with their fifth as a couple of them are busy with school or work. This is a very good curling team, and Laurie plays the game with no fear and a big smile.

I’m hoping they keep this run going.

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When I grow up, I want to be Krista McCarville.

I’m getting a bit tired of the Curling Canada Foundation commercial with all the goofy kids saying what they want to be when they grow up … including the girl who wants to be a scientist while holding a pebble hose (bad start!). This commercial has been on the air for so long I feel that even the kid who didn’t know what he wanted to be probably has a job by now.

But following this theme, I wanted to add my voice to this cheesy commercial: When I grow up, I want to be Krista McCarville.

Okay … I am already grown up, so it’s too late for me. But if you’re a young curler looking for a role model, I hope you are watching this team.

They are unlike the other top teams. Most top squads follow the same formula: try to play well enough to get into the Slams; play a million tournaments to get better.

The challenge with the Olympic movement is that we have created a generation of curlers who are aspiring to be professional curlers, and nothing else. I have to say, when I was a young curler decades ago, that was not an option. The best curlers and role models that I knew had day jobs; they curled for fun, mostly on weekdays and weeknights.

Today, aspiring young curlers look at the Slams. This is a series of six big cash tournaments for the top 15 teams in the world. If you play in these, you need multiple weeks off work (as these tournaments run all week). This is not conducive to having a career. So the model for a young curler looking to grow up to be a champion is to go all in.

But here is an alternate model for success, the Krista McCarville foursome. They are the Oakland A’s in Moneyball. Except instead of having less money than the other teams—like the A’s—they have less time.

They achieve an incredibly high level of play while having lives. This team has been close to winning the Scotties multiple times (they’ve lost two finals) and finished in the final three to represent Canada at last year’s Olympics. This is undisputedly one of the top five teams in Canada.

So how do they do this? How do they manage to compete with the best women’s teams in the world while actually having families, jobs and lives?

Well, they practice. A lot.

And they have some pretty good coaching, from no less than my childhood hero and the guy whose slide my random Quebec toe-tuck is modeled after: Rick Lang.

They shun the Slams. They play only a small schedule. They came into this Scotties with hardly any CTRS points, ranked 15th out of 18 teams.

But they’ve clinched Pool B at 7-1, and are looking likely to be in the mix again this year.

I hope young players are asking themselves if this is a model they can emulate to be good at curling. Maybe there is another path to curling success. You can compete against the pro teams.

Now if we can just get the commentators to stop talking about how their reduced schedule kills their chance of winning.