Delivery
Delivery mechanics and take-out weight
One article that Bill Tschirhart left out of the book “A Pane in the Glass” is this one, entitled “The Physicist, the Exercise Physiologist, and the Coach“. In it, Bob Comartin of the CCA Performance Enhancement team discusses the physiology and technical mechanics of the delivery with Jerome Gazdewich, a Level 3 CCA-certified instructor from the Pointe Claire Curling Club in Pointe Claire, Quebec (a suburb of Montreal). The article is a great read and gives some interesting insight into the mechanics of adapting a delivery to take-out weight, particularly with junior girls, since Jerome’s frame of reference involves his high-performance coaching of a junior girls’ rink in Pointe Claire. The bulk of the material concerns precisely how additional force is generated out of the hack to deliver a stone with take-out weight, and provides some solid evidence for why it is important to keep the toe of the hack foot from contacting the surface of the ice prior to
The Junior hack
This afternoon I helped Jason Rice and John Tartt run a Club Coach refresher course at the Guelph Curling Club. During the course I got some interest in the Junior program at Elmira and, in particular, the Junior hack we use for 7- and 8-year-olds. I realized that I didn’t have any photographs of the Junior hack posted on Throwing Stones, so here they are. As you can see from this photograph: the Junior hack is constructed of 2×6 cedar planks, held together by a combination of 3 1/2 and 4 1/2 inch galvanized bolts, and attached to the side boards of the curling club adjacent to sheet 1. The hack consists of a single Marco hack on each end, which when mounted sits directly on the center line. I went with a single hack design simply to save on weight, to reduce the amount of torque on the structure when it’s in use. Attaching the hack to the side
How many rotations?
Just how many times should a curling stone rotate as it moves down the ice? Ideally, during a delivery a stone travels – initially – down the line of delivery towards the target, with a rotation applied by the wrist just prior to the release. On a draw shot, when the stone reaches the other end of the sheet, both its forward travel and its rotation cease simultaneously. In the most recent OCA Blue Challenge booklet for junior curlers, Challenge #2 (Consistent rotations) calls for: The curler is to deliver 6 draw stones with 2 to 4 rotations. Little Rock curlers may have 2 to 5 rotations. While at the Team Glenn Howard fantasy camp in early October I asked lead Craig Savill about his experience with stone rotations. Craig felt that fewer than two rotations was inadequate, particularly on curling club ice where there may be sufficient frost on the ice surface to cause the stone to lose its