A CURLING SURPRISE

       Now my last post was to set you up for this post. 

      I hope that somewhere in my last post you got the idea that in the rural areas curling was not very highly organized. Curling was only in the evening unless it was a bonspiel. So sometimes when kids got bored we would enter the curling rink, which was never locked and throw a few rocks. If somebody caught us we got kicked out.

     I came to Red Deer in 1969 and taught in a middle school of about 500 students. There were two other middle schools in the city. One was smaller and had just opened in 1969. The other school was not highly organized in  athletic activities. Our school had basket ball, volley ball and badminton and not too much opportunity for competition.

    So in 1970 I got it in my head to start after school curling for kids. Still being this naive country boy, I phoned the local curling rink and asked if kids could play after school. Did I get a surprise. In a city this size curling was highly organized. They had just never thought of kids curling.

    After a little discussion they agreed to let kids curl after school for free. So I had some great kids who either wanted to curl or learn to curl. The next year another teacher joined me and his idea was to teach curling and he was very good at it. 

    Curling continued for three or four years. I didn't have the time to give to it any more so I did not carry on with curling. . 

    However, there was something that happened that I had never dreamed about. This naive little farm boy had never heard of high school nationals in curling. You guessed it. One of my little guys continued with curling in high school and went to the Canadian National high school competition.

    Now I worked with Doug's Mom and see her since we've retired. She always reminds me of Doug and curling and you can tell that she's very proud of him. I see Doug about every 15 years and he always talks about learning to curl when he was a kid.