On the U21s, Sweeping in the Club, and Sponsorship Dollars
It's time for another mailbag!
Hey friends. My apologies, as I tweeted out asking for mailbag questions almost a week ago and am just getting to them now. I’m about to head out of town on a little vacation, so I had a busy week of getting work done and now have some time to tackle your questions! If you have a question for the mailbag, make sure you follow me on Twitter so you can see when I ask for Qs. Onward!
First of all, shout out to Team Plett! First team in history to win both the U18 and U21 Canadian championships in a single season. Incredibly impressive feat and I know all 4 of those girls are crazy dedicated (and come from some pretty solid lineage) and are going to be a force for years to come. Also, shout out to Johnson Tao and his team for winning the boys’ side. Johnson is a BC boy and we always respect our sons, even when they leave us for the lure of the Golden Bear.
(photo credit: Curling Canada)
So the answer to this question is pretty myriad, I think. First of all, the U21 tournament never had a TON of exposure to start with. I think maybe we’ve been a bit tricked because big U21 moments are replayed on Brier/Scotties broadcasts throughout history once the players are all growns up, but it wasn’t as though at the time, it was some ratings juggernaut. Quick, tell me who won the 2017 U21 ladies’ championship!!! Exactly.
And then of course, the tournament was moved. It used to occupy its own space in the Season of Champions calendar in late January before the Scotties, and now it’s in the middle of the neverending curling loop of February-April, where it seems as though there’s a major event every week and people aren’t dying to see more national championships. Running the finals the same weekend that the Men’s Worlds is starting is tough. And then finally, CBC and then TSN used to run the junior championship weekends on TV. Now they don’t.
(Kristen Streifel won the 2017 U21 women’s. Saved you a click.)
This is an awesome question and one probably a lot of club curlers wonder about. The short answer is no, unless your league still allows you to use banned fabrics. Then the short answer is yes. Let’s assume they don’t, so the longer answer depends on three factors:
Are you in good shape? Healthy doesn’t necessarily imply muscular (not picking on you, these are general questions) and you need to get a lot of torque on that broom for directional sweeping to be effective.
Do you actually know the proper technique? It’s easy to watch it on TV, but there’s a lot being done with how force is applied that you may not be able to pick up on and apply correctly.
Does your skip know how to call line for it? Having a skip that’s knowledgable of break points and when exactly directional sweeping is and isn’t effective is crucial.
I would guess that for the average club curler (ie. one that isn’t in say, the top handful of rinks that might win your club championship), you’re never having the perfect confluence of these three factors to make it worth it and you might even be doing more damage than you are helping. I’ll also say this: no top team is mentioning it publicly, but there are definitely top teams who aren’t necessarily convinced that directional sweeping makes a huge difference on certain shots. Essentially since Broomgate it’s been an 8-year race for knowledge and teams are still experimenting behind closed doors. My advice would be this: if you and your skip can handle it and it makes the game more fun for you to more closely emulate what you see the pros do, then go for it. I can’t really do the Michigan in hockey but I’ll still try it occasionally in beer league for fun. But if you can’t handle it or are confused (or maybe aren’t that good of a sweeper), just make sure that your inside sweeper is always the correct one for straighter and faster (sweeping against the curl like the old days) and don’t do anything else but enjoy your league night out.
Ooooh, that’s a good question. I think it’s gotta be Owen Purcell. Perfect combination of excellent player and shallower province to get the job done, maybe as soon as next year. Could’ve been there this year to be honest, they missed their last shot against Matthew Manuel to win Nova Scotia (I also think Mr. Manuel is very good, for the record). Owen’s a former Canadian junior champ and has all the tools. Another former Canadian (and world!) junior champ I could see getting to a Brier soon is Braden Calvert. I’m going to go ahead and guess he finds his way out of Manitoba this season and will also be on the shortlist (xoxo).
Two similar questions here. To answer Dave’s first, no competitive team wants it to be a year-long waiting period. We’ve gone back and forth on it with the U21s and I think we’ve already discovered it’s not great there. I can see why curling fans ask the question, but there’s also the major factor that the Worlds are just harder now. They just are. Sometimes it’s ok to accept that, and realize that moving the Brier/Scotties to the fall isn’t going to be some magic dust we sprinkle on Canadian teams that makes them win more medals. With how good the Swiss were this year, does Kerri Einarson winning the Scotties in November instead of February make a huge difference? I’m not convinced.
The other problem is, if you move it…where are you moving it to buy the teams more time? Curling teams love the cash spiel season to get their teams right, and the Grand Slams are huge for the top teams. The cash spiel season is also on a knife’s edge right now, as we are losing WCT events at an alarming rate. If you move the Scotties and Brier to say, November, you are now taking away two weekends right in the middle of the season that cash spiels can run. And you’d say, “well just move those to January/February!” but teams that aren’t in the Brier/Scotties race probably check out then (or break up). Sure, top teams might chase points in Jan/Feb, but a mid-tier team that kinda didn’t like each other and lost a C Final at provincials isn’t sticking around to donate money and get their butt kicked like they might in October in the name of “growth”. You can’t run cash spiels without the mid-tier teams and that’s the reality.
The teams trying to peak for the Brier/Scotties also likely play less cash spiels to start with, and that’s also bad. Plus, the addition of the Pan-Continental Championships in the fall impacts the schedule further. We already saw both Team Canadas, Team Gushue and Team Einarson, not play a single competitive game in a curling club this year because of the PanCon (and other factors). That’s tough for cash spiels when you don’t have two of the biggest draws for your event playing on tour outside of the Slams and SoC events. The reality is probably that the curling calendar has been so set for so many years that we just aren’t likely to see a huge change (unless we go on some catastrophic, decade-long medal drought).
Yes. I think it stays beyond this season and will extend to all events. I still think we’re another massive rule change away from where the game needs to get to, but the no-tick is a good band-aid in the meantime.
As I mentioned above, neither Brad Gushue nor Kerri Einarson’s teams played a competitive event in a club this season (both would’ve played in some for Mixed Doubles and I’ve heard Kerri also plays league in Gimli. Their full teams did not). Did it affect Kerri’s ability to win at worlds? I don’t think so. I don’t think ice reading as a skill diminishes because you aren’t playing in clubs with your team regularly, especially since most top skips have played skip their whole life and have faced lots of bad ice conditions. Most top curlers will tell you, some ice is simply unreadable and some spots are just gonna be tough no matter what you do, and every sheet is going to be different so what works in one club/arena with “bad ice” may not work in another that also does. That said, I talked to a lot of people who were at Worlds and said the ice was totally fine and mostly consistent. In particular, Mike Harris sent me a lot of texts about it after a tweet of mine. (hi Mike!)
If anything, it’s maybe not the ice reading skills that erode, but the frustration with the ice that gets into the heads of the players and affects their shot-making when they play 90% of their games in a given season on a really good surface. I don’t think any top decision-maker would see a bronze medal at the Worlds from Einarson and think, “jeez, we better get those ladies practicing a few times at a one-sheeter in Carrot River to get them more prepared!” I also think those who said this about Kerri during the Worlds sorta conveniently overlooked that every top Canadian team played in the PointsBet this year and that might’ve been the trickiest ice I saw all year, including clubs. A lot of top coaches will tell their players to own the ice, no matter what the surface looks like. Some times that can be tougher to do than other times.
Any switch to third from any other position is the hardest. It’s funny that two guests on Way Inside this year both noted to me how hard it was. Marc Kennedy told me it was really hard moving from front end to back end because you now have to line-read and it might not be a skill you’re fully dialled into. Tyler Tardi told me it was hard to move from skip to third because he was used to seeing six rocks travel in different paths before he threw, now he sees only two. And he’s gotta sweep. Plus, wherever you’re moving from, you also have to adjust to now being the best and most important player on the team.
Ok, last one. People always love the money questions. I have some insight into this from my own career and also from talking to curlers, and while I can’t be too specific out of respect to the teams, high-six figures is, as you said, a little on the generous side. Now, mid-six figures is definitely within range for the tippy-top teams and so if you combined sponsorship dollars with winnings, maybe a team can get to that high-six range total.
That said, it’s a very, very, very small pocket of teams pulling that much cash. A big bag generally happens because of two things: first, the team’s exposure. Goes without saying. If you’re Brad Gushue or Rachel Homan or Jennifer Jones, you can pull more money than a team ranked 30th in the world can. Obviously. Second, personal relationships. Some of the mid-tier teams on tour that play 6-7 events a year pull more than some of the teams that are in the top 10, just simply because they either own their own company that’s stacked with cash, or they know someone high up in a company who can help them out. The year my team got the most sponsorship was the year after I coached minor hockey and the CFO from Boston Pizza’s kid was on my team. We chatted curling and he loved the story and what I was up to, and was very generous for a year after I volunteered with his son. A lot of the big cash sponsorship stories you might hear are like that. Some of this is also location dependent. Generally speaking, a curling team in a curling-mad province has an easier time pulling sponsors because businesses in that province understand what curling can offer (or maybe they even curl themselves). The 5th-best team in Alberta is a lot more likely to pull decent money than the 5th-best team in BC or Nova Scotia.
I do know this, even some of the top 10 teams will note how tough it can be to generate capital compared to a top 3 or 5 team. I’ve had a few conversations with skips in that 7-10 range and it can be tough because often a company that’s willing to do a big sponsorship deal with a curling team only wants to sponsor one team (or maybe two: one men’s and one women’s). They don’t want to dilute their cash by splitting it amongst teams, they want a team to be their sole focus and have their brand represented by a single team. Often, it’s a company that’s already involved in sponsoring curling in some way (ie. Boost sponsoring a Grand Slam but also Team Homan, or Princess Auto doing the same for Reid Carruthers), as they wanna double dip by sponsoring an event, but also some players. So again, it’s simple math. Let’s say there are 5 companies in all of Canada who are willing to give $100,000 to a team and they have no personal relationships with any players on tour. Are they going to give it to a team that’s ranked 9th in the world, or a team that’s ranked 1st or 2nd or 3rd? It’s often that simple.
As you can imagine, while there might be teams pulling those mid-six figures, much like the WCT Money List the drop-off is steep and you might have one team in the top 10 that has $250k and one team in the top 10 that has $30k. And then you might have a team that’s ranked 22nd but has $60k. It’s not an exact science and teams lose and gain sponsors all the time. In our sport, it’s a constant juggling act and it’s one of the reasons why so many Canadian teams quit the elite competition part of the game. Paying to lose sucks a lot. Trust me, I know.
Another one in the books! Thanks so much for reading and thanks to everyone who asked a question. Sorry if I didn’t get to yours, there’s always next time. If you want to subscribe and get this delivered to your inbox every time I write it, hit that subscribe button up top. We are getting close to 1000 subscribers and I’d love to get there by the end of the curling season, so hit it! And as always, you can follow me on Twitter at @cullenoncurling and you can listen to the latest episode of my podcast, Way Inside, right here. Jill Officer was my guest and she was a delight! Check it out.
Great edition John !