In contrast to typical bonspiels or club play, each team involved in an Ontario Curling Association event, such as bantam zone playdowns, is entitled to a brief pre-game practice before each game.
The practice is indeed brief. The 2011-2012 OCA Rules Supplement, page 11, in the section entitled “Pre-game Practice”, states:
All competitions shall allow time for a one minute cooling/sliding period and a seven (7) minute per team pre-game, organized practice.
Practice is to be on the sheet of ice where the team is scheduled to play and only with the stones they will be using in the game. Stones cannot be touched during the cooling period.
Seven minutes is an important improvement over the five minutes tried last year during the 2010-2011 season, which, in my view, is too short altogether.
Because the practice is so short, to be effective it has to be organized. Many coaches have strong preferences about how the pre-game practice should be done. What really matters, however, is how well the pre-game practice can work for your rink.
A pre-game practice can have several possible goals, or combinations of goals. These goals include, but are not limited to:
- To have all members of the rink acquire the feel for draw weight;
- To have the rink’s front-end determine the timings for guard weight;
- To match their stones on that sheet;
- To learn the ice for draw shots, both inside-out and outside-in, and to and from the home end of the sheet;
- To learn the ice for take-out weight shots, again inside-out and outside-in, to and from the home end;
- To determine how sensitive the ice is to brushing, so that the front end has an idea of the impact they can make on a stone;
and perhaps a number of others. And these goals can differ between the teams who have the first practice session before the start of play, and which have the latter.
Clearly, not all of these goals can be satisfied in seven minutes; so the team must choose which goals are the most important. This is where teams need to listen to suggestions of what they might do with their practice time, but the rink has to decide what their practice goals are and what will work for them as a unit. For example, there is absolutely nothing wrong for a team to use its latter half of the seven minutes for the skip to play draw shots (with sweeping) in order to feel confident with making draws to the pin prior to the first end of play. Obviously, with that amount of time other practice goals will be abandoned. But if the rink – again, as a unit – believes that for their team, the skip’s confidence with draw weight is of utmost importance, then who’s to say they’re wrong?
But whatever the goals of the practice, what is required is that it must be planned. And planned to the last detail: precisely who is throwing which stone, on what path, in what player rotation, with what weight, and what turn, with sweeping or without. And this seven-minute practice must itself be practiced so that every member of the rink knows exactly what they’re doing when they step on the ice.