Both challenges are difficult—and equally important
Some big Canadian curling news to kick off the new year.
This week, Curling Canada announced Nolan Thiessen as its new Chief Executive Officer, and the news has—rightly—been received with great fanfare and near-unanimous approval. Nolan is the best of both worlds, an avid Brier-winning former competitive curler and an and an increasingly savvy sports executive.
Plus, he is just a really nice guy.
He now takes on the daunting task of Curling Canada boss, a unique role which has two sometimes contradictory objectives by which he will be measured:
1) How do you keep growing curling in Canada?
2) How do we get back to winning medals at the Olympics?
I would argue both challenges seem very difficult right now, and both are equally important.
How do we keep growing the game?
This one is going to be tough.
There is no doubt that curling in Canada is not in as strong a place as it was 20 years ago. We have not effectively captured the next generation of fans and participants. We have not tapped in enough to the increasingly multi-ethnic nature of Canada. I still strongly believe in the power of curling as driver of community, and its ability to serve as a hub. It is an accessible game and a social game. But we have work to do.
Junior programs were decimated by two lost years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Every curling club in Canada needs a strong junior program, with the main focus on fun. Curling is an accessible and cheap sport for kids, and this is the doorway into different communities. How to build an effective program in every club should be near the top of Nolan’s lengthy to-do list.
How do we increase the stature of Canada’s marquee events—the Brier and the Scotties—and halt the trend of smaller arenas, sponsors and attendance? That is a subject for a longer article, but these events definitely need to be part of how we grow the sport in Canada.
How do we get back to winning?
This is probably the biggest question David Murdoch and Nolan face. How do we get Canada back to winning medals at the Olympics? We are the home to the majority of the world’s curlers, and we have more competitive depth than any country by a mile, but that no longer translates to success. Yes, we did win a well-earned bronze at the last Games, but clearly the days of expecting Canadian dominance at the world level are over, and have been over for a while.
What about creating super teams?
We are thinking errantly about team building in Canada.
We are trying to make Gushue (or Dunstone or Koe or Bottcher or Homan or Einerson) better. We talk about residency rules, to try to make it easier for them to build teams. We talk about the dates of qualifier events, and giving them a bit more time to prepare.
This is an antiquated approach.
These teams will already do everything they can to be better, and there is little we can do to help them. They have sponsors, they have funding. They will be very good. But this is not how the most successful programs are building the next generation of winning teams.
We now need to look at countries that are successfully producing “super teams” and figure out what they are doing differently. We need to look at Scotland and Italy (for men’s) and Korea and Japan for the women. What are they doing differently to produce teams that can win medals? Or maybe we should look back at our own success, like the last men’s team in Canada to win the gold (Brad Jacobs). What is the secret formula?
It turns out the answer is not that complicated.
First you start with four dedicated, young, full-time athletes.
• Make curling their day job.
• Create a year-round training facility for them featuring superb ice.
• Make sure the team all lives close to said training facility and can practice TOGETHER every day.
• Make sure the front end spends enough time in the gym so that they look like they could win bodybuilding contests.
• Fund their travel and spieling.
• Provide top-notch coaching, of which Canada has an abundance (so much that we are exporting it to every other country!)
• Collect Olympic medals!
Instead, we expect our athletes that have non-curling day jobs who live all over the country to magically come together and beat teams that do this for a living.
My team (which is by no means a contender for the Olympics) played against Ross Whyte—one of the top funded Scottish teams—at Oakville in early September. It was, at that time, our sixth time on the ice during the new season. For Whyte and his lads, it marked their 55th game of the season to that point.
Fifty-five times on the ice … by early September. We are not competitive.
And Covid has widened the gulf. While we shut down clubs and cancelled tournaments, the other countries locked themselves into their Olympic-training facilities with their coaches and got better. Way better. They learned how to sweep more effectively, and learned to throw with six-plus rotations, which is especially effective on arena ice with sharp rocks. It is not a surprise that Canadian teams now make up less than one-third of the field in Grand Slam events.
We need to forget about trying to make our existing teams better, and instead focus on creating the super team that will win six years from now. And I guarantee you—with all due respect—that team is not named Gushue, Jones or Koe.
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Team Fournier update!
For those of you craving news and content about my team (hi mom!) we will be playing in the Ontario Provincials Jan 24-28 at the Flight Exec Centre in Dorchester. The top 12 teams in Ontario will play in a modified triple knockout format for the coveted Ontario spot at the Brier. I can’t wait.
We had a decent cashspiel season so far, although we failed to bag any trophies. We made it deep in a couple of significant events, and beat some big teams along the way. Now we practice our butts off until the 24th in our quest for Trillium glory.
The Ontario provincials are unusually free from any top Slam teams, as Epping and Howard have both fallen from the top 20 in the world. But they are still Epping and Howard, and the field is full of excellent teams, including Sam Mooibrook’s who is quickly climbing in those rankings. I would argue that the Ontario Tankard has the deepest field of any provincial in the country. There are no free spaces.
So thanks to our sponsors (Zimmer Biomet and Hardline—the best brooms in the game) for your support, and if you are around come and watch! I believe they are also streaming games (at least they did last year), so you should be able to watch from your living room.