Blog
High-performance brushing in the open stance
This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on the Ontario Curling Council website on 4 October 2017. This is joint work with John Newhook of Dalhousie University. We would like to thank Fraser Reid, former Canadian university champion with Wilfrid Laurier University, and Paige Bown of Team Dominique Vivier, for their demonstrations of brushing in the open stance. As coaches, we ordinarily teach brushing in the open stance to novices. For novice players, the open stance is considerably safer than alternative tactics. In the open stance, the player faces the skip while brushing and the feet are both facing forward, making the open stance much easier to learn for beginning players. Karlee Burgess and brushing partner Emily Zacharias brush a draw during the 2023 Manitoba provincial playdowns. Both athletes are in the closed stance. Photo credit: Connie Laliberte. Before ‘Broomgate’ in 2015, the Rules of Curling stipulated that any brushing motion had to take place fully
The importance of the preshot routine
This article was originally published on 23 March 2016 on the Ontario Curling Council website. Last week, during my own club game, I was reminded in the 3rd end why a preshot routine is critical to a sound curling delivery. With my first stone of the 3rd end, I became distracted while cleaning my stone. Then, rather than placing the stone precisely in front of my hack foot with the correct handle orientation, I had left it straddling the center line. Then I got in the hack as usual, but with the stone in the wrong place. I recall thinking that this wasn’t feeling right, but no matter, I’d throw it anyway rather than stand up and start over. Big mistake. Without completing my preshot routine as usual, I simply wasn’t ready to throw. Predictably, I missed. Consistency and the preshot routine In way that’s very similar to golf, adhering to preshot routine in curling is essential for competitive play.
Setup – The importance of the slide foot position
This article is joint work with John Newhook of Dalhousie University. Routinely, one of the delivery elements we encounter frequently with young athletes is the inconsistent placement of their slide foot when in the setup position prior to beginning the delivery. In the delivery it is critical that the slide foot be positioned in a heel-toe orientation relative to the hack foot so as to permit the athlete to squat without twisting their hips, which leads to a multitude of potential problems that must be “fixed” in order to release the stone correctly on the line of delivery.  This article (click on the image at right to open the PDF), originally written in 2014, documents the effects of a misplaced slide foot in the setup position. We are grateful to former Wilfrid Laurier varisty athlete Evie Fortier of Ottawa who acted as our model for the photographs included in the article. To better illustrate the issues that can occur with
Curling, university, and the student-athlete
This article was originally published on the Ontario Curling Council website on 6 August 2016. Come September many active U18 curlers will make their way to Universities and Colleges across Ontario to begin their university careers as student-athletes. The majority of these student-athletes are already experienced players, many with several seasons of competitive play behind them and looking forward to continuing their pursuit of high-performance play by trying out for their respective school teams. And that is the subject of this post: what to expect from your school’s curling program when you arrive on campus as a freshman student on Labour Day. University curling in Canada is very competitive, and the calibre of play is high. At the university level, teams must consistently shoot in the 80-85% range in order to be successful. This past season, the Wilfrid Laurier Golden Hawks men’s curling team earned the right to represent Canada at the 2017 World University Games in Almaty, Kazakhstan by winning
Blocked, Distributed, and Random Practice as it Relates to Skill Acquisition in Curling
This article originally appeared on the Wilfrid Laurier Golden Hawks High-Performance website on 27 February 2012. An age-old question in sport is what practice structure yields the best results in relation to effective skill acquisition. This article will define three different practice structures that are referred to as Blocked, Distributed and Random. The answer to this question is critical to all coaches, as they need to structure practices appropriately by selecting technical development drills that are appropriate given the biomotor capabilities of the athletes they are working with, as well as considering such mitigating factors as experience and degree of neuromuscular development. These elements, as well as others, all must be woven into the appropriate tapestry that will lay the foundation for elite athlete development. Blocked Practice refers to practice where one skill is worked on at a time. This skill is worked on until a predetermined level of competence is acquired, and then the coach and athlete move on to the
Applying toe-dip to a curling shoe
This article was originally written on 7 December 2012 and published on the Laurier Golden Hawks High-Performance Curling website. During a curling delivery the trailing (hack) leg can produce such significant drag that it can impact the ability of the curler to achieve what coach Bill Tschirhart calls an optimal “window of velocity” during the slide, and hence can impact both the speed and accuracy of the curling stone. Consequently, many curling shoes arrive from the manufacturer (Asham, Goldline, Balance Plus) with a toe coating on the hack shoe, made from a tough, hard resin that has a much lower coefficient of friction on the ice than leather. That toe coating is commonly referred to as a “toe dip” and in this article I will illustrate how to apply a toe dip to a shoe that doesn’t have one from the manufacturer. In this case, I’ll apply a toe dip using “Tuff Toe” onto a pair of two-tone Asham “Slam”