The Event Horizon(s)

This post is the fourth in a series of posts about the sport of curling.

Bonspiels typically have "Events" in the bracket. The implied meaning of these are that they are "consolation" brackets for teams who have been knocked out of the main bracket (usually termed the A Event or 1st Event). Depending on the way the spiel is formatted, the various events have different levels of prestige (events where the winner can only have one loss are more prestigious than those where two losses are possible).

Example images of the bracket for our home bonspiel in 2015.

The biggest deal about playing in event finals is that you get to, as curlers say "play on Sunday". Only the best teams in the spiel make it this far into the weekend of competition, and there is some perceived value of bang for your buck (registration fees) for getting to play more games, particularly at the introductory level. Time on the ice is crucial to getting better, so the more games you play, the more practice you have, and the better you (hopefully) get.

Our team made a few event finals in our first couple of seasons, but our first event win was at the Belfast Crash Spiel in Belfast, ME in 2015 during our second season of competition. It was a huge relief to finally win the last game of a spiel, and I remember being incredibly proud of the achievement of the team. I was so happy that I popped for dinner afterwards on the long drive home (when you don't have a lot of money in grad school, that's a big deal).

The Belfast Curling Club, which hosted my favorite spiel in college curling. It was partly the success we had there (three time event winners, once overall winner), but mostly the atmosphere of the event.

That really opened the floodgates for us, and soon, we were winning events at many and then most spiels we attended. That's not to say that we were good by that point, but we had certainly transitioned to being one of the better new programs in the East. This showed at Nationals that year, where we finally won a game and also played some very good teams to the wire, ultimately losing an event final for a medal.

By the end of the 2016/2017 school year, we had made a couple of A Event finals as well (aka, the best two teams left), but had so far come up short each time. It had been a little frustrating, but we knew we were right on the precipice of taking that next step. In the last spiel of the year before nationals in Utica, NY, we lost a tight A final, and so we were hitting our stride just at the right time. To make things even better, Nationals was to be held at the same facility in a few weeks.

To say that the tournament was a bit of a dream is pretty accurate. We went 3-0 in pool play, defeating MIT, University of Wisconsin Green Bay, and Oklahoma. Our semi-final match up was against the 2016 Runners-Up, the University of Minnesota. We had seen them last year in pool play and played a close game, coming down to the last shot. Unfortunately, our run ended there, having a rough outing due to some poorly timed missed shots. Minnesota was obviously the better team, and they ended up going on to easily win the National Championship in their next game.

Sometimes, defeat is crushing, and sometimes elating. To say that I was ecstatic with our performance that weekend is an understatement. In three short seasons, we had gone from 0-4 at Nationals to only losing one game, and to the best team in the country! Their team had been curling all of their lives (curling is much more entrenched in sports culture in the Midwest than in the East), and here we were, all having curled for only one to three years. That was a pretty meteoric rise. But there was still work to be done, and we had our eyes set on the horizon for tournament and Nationals hardware, which had so far eluded us.

Next week's installment will continue with results of the 2017-2018 season, the last of the author's time in graduate school.