Team Clendenan

“Obstacles, of course, are developmentally necessary: they teach kids strategy, patience, critical thinking, resilience and resourcefulness.”
Naomi Wolf

Summing up the event win at the inaugural OJCT Galt Country Slam is hard to do in an abbreviated blog that needs to cover two full days of curling, but one undeniable common thread was patience.

There were 5 games played on the way to the championship title which included a round robin pool of three games, pool playoffs and then finals. Of these five games, 60% of the matchups found the good guys struggling for the first half of the game and in the championship round the comeback was torturously delayed until the final end. Despite how hard it was on the gallery to survive their nerves during the process, the marvelous part was that Team Clendenan demonstrated a remarkable ability to remain calm and to support each other through slow and steady resilience that ultimately toppled four out of five opponents. Incidentally, the singular weekend loss was by one point in their first game and though the girls needed three points to tie, they were within a fraction of doing so and the Bobcaygeon (Humphries) team narrowly escaped.

When a team is faced with physical performance shortfalls, the demands of the mental side of curling are exponential. In fact the difference between the head game making or breaking you pretty much boils down to attitude. Many a team has let a win slip through their fingers when attitude is eroded, or as was the case for Team Clendenan, rebounded towards a win because of a positive attitude. For example, trailing on the scoreboard can be disheartening as a game approaches the half way mark, or with a slightly different outlook it can be similar to cyclists that draft to save energy – after all, cliché’s such as “it’s never over until it’s over” must have come from somewhere. Realistically though, it takes a special kind of team to be able to shoulder mistakes on the fly and the purple crew deserves kudos for turning to each other when the chips were down, particularly in the semi’s (vs Auld) and in the finals (vs Bernard) where control sat uncomfortably with the opposition. The patience to see each curing end as a new opportunity and to stay focused on their plan even when things were going wrong almost undetectably allowed Team Clendenan to convert obstacles into stepping stones for success. It goes without saying that the girls are far stronger for the struggle than they would have been without it and the lessons learned will ideally come in handy for future events as well.

Keep fighting the fight girls. You never know what you are capable of until you are nudged out of your comfort zone.