Mitch Calvert
Get ready to grab the rock and roll it to your heart’s content.
The Fort Frances Curling Club will hold registration there tonight starting at 7 p.m. Registration forms are available online, which can be mailed in or dropped off at the club at a later date, but signing up tonight is the ideal route.
Good news for local curlers this year is the addition of new and improved rocks.
“The rocks have a running surface on them, and after a number of years there’s a lot of wear on those surfaces,” explained Tom Fry, who sits on the executive committee.
“Initially, the first couple times, you can usually just get a procedure called a sharpening to grind them down, but after years of use, pitting occurs,” he noted. “So this time, we’ve sent them away and they are putting a new core of a different kind of granite in there and putting new running surfaces on the new rocks.”
Fry said the change will make a world of difference for the quality of games—levelling the playing field across-the-board.
“It’ll make it fairer because the way the rocks were getting, some were worse than others so you weren’t quite sure what was going to happen with some of them,” he remarked.
Once again for this season, the club will host curling clinics this fall.
The novice clinic for beginners is slated for Saturday, Oct. 18, which includes a six-hour classroom and on-ice session emphasizing the fundamentals of the game. The cost is $10 for club members and $20 for non-members.
The intermediate clinic is set for the following day (Oct. 19), which is aimed at those curlers who have played for a while but are looking to brush up on their skills.
The fees are the same as for the novice clinic.
The club also is planning to host a novice/Bantam camp on Nov. 1-2 for those curlers aged 12-18. The camp includes 12 hours of classroom and on-ice instruction for $15.
“We’ve probably put 600 to 700 people through those clinics over the years,” Fry recalled. “[It] generally works out good for the person going through the clinic because it gets them efficient at a much quicker rate.”
In other news, the Fort Frances Curling Club is hosting the Northern Ontario men’s playdowns on Feb. 9-14, with the winning team advancing to the 2009 Brier. “That’s about as big as it gets for this curling club,” Fry enthused. “We’re really looking forward to that one this year because it’s a new format involving 16 teams.
“We did host [the provincials] in our 100th anniversary year, but it’s quite a bit bigger of an event now,” he noted.
Fry said there’s a possibility a local rink could participate in the provincials, but they would have to go through a couple of stages to qualify.
