Team Plys Curling

National Champions

2008-02-14T09:06:00.002-06:00

Hello all.....

We successfully defend our National Championship this year!!!! As you know from previous posts, Nationals were held in Portage, Wisconsin. I made brief comments on some of the games during Nationals, and I would like this post to serve as a summary of the whole event.

First things first, the competition went really well. We had a very good week, shooting extremely well for many of the games. We had possibly the worst game I have ever seen us play against North Dakota. We lost on the last shot. Rather than getting upset about the lost, we just kinda laughed and thought "if we can play so bad and lose on the last shot, then we are in good shape." We rebounded nicely from that loss, winning the rest of our games. We went 8-1 in the round robin, placing us in first going into the semis. We won our page-semi game, and won the finals pretty easily.

We didn't know what to expect from the other teams going into the event, because a lot of them were very young and inexperienced. That inexperience did not seem to have much of an effect on the teams. The younger North Dakota team, and the inexperienced NY and Washington teams all played very well, finishing in the top 5. I would have to say that the event was a disappointment for the other MN team and for Massachusetts. They were ranked very high going into the event and finished with only 5 and 4 wins respectively.

Portage was an interesting club, to say the least. It was extremely small, which caused a lot of the fans to be miserably hot during the games. On top of that, there weren't many places to hold team meetings. It was a constant fight to secure a table for pregame and 5th end break meetings. The people, however, were extremely nice. Most would go out of their way to make you feel at home. The only problem with Nationals this year was that there is not a lot to do in Portage! We spent two days at the Dells, which is seriously all we did other than curl and watch curling. Needless to say, we all spent a little too much money at the Tanger Outlet (especially Chris with his hideous glasses!!! Haha.)

The banquet/closing party was the usual. You eat some good food and listen to people talk. In a somewhat pleasant surprise, Chris, Aanders, and myself (Matt P.) all won all-star awards for our positions. While these awards are really meaningless compared to the fact that we won Nationals, it was nice to be recognized for what we felt was a good week for our team. (Also, congrats to little Tom Gabower, who won all-star lead.)

Looking forward to the next step, Sweden, we are all very excited. We finished fifth last year at Worlds, so we are hoping to get a medal this time around. We gained a lot of experience from Worlds last year and all of our traveling this year. Hopefully it all pays off. I know that if we play well, then we will have a good chance of winning the event. It's all about putting a good week together, which I know that we can do.

Until next time, which will be in Sweden,

Team USA
(That sounds so much better than Team MN1.... Haha.)

Nationals 2

2008-02-07T11:07:00.001-06:00

Hello everyone.....

Well we have played 8 of our 9 round robin games, and we only have one loss so far. As we said going into the competition, we were never going to go undefeated. We had our worst game ever as a team against the young Nodak team. They played decent, and we were awful. We bounced back after that loss with wins over Wisconsin and Minn 2. The Wisconsin game was close for a while, but we pulled ahead soon after the fifth end break and never looked back. The Minn 2 game was very close. We never lost the lead, however, they came within one shot a couple of times. We removed Minn 2 from competition with that win. The following teams have the potential of making it to the semis: Us (we're garunteed), Nodak, New York, Washington, and possibly Wisconsin. The draw at four is going to separate the pretenders from the contenders.

Until next time......
MN 1 Men

Nationals so far

2008-02-05T02:07:00.000-06:00

Hello everyone....

It is late on Monday night, and we have played four games as of now. We are 4-0, beating MI, WA, NY, and AK. In all of the games, we started out playing a good aggressive game, and got decently large leads. After that, we switched to our peel game and held our lead. We are all playing extremely well so far, so we really just need to keep it up. The ice has been fantastic (which pains me to say because I would hate giving Garland credit...... haha.) The club is also good. It is pretty small, but the people working there are very nice and helpful. As usual, the officials are doing there jobs. We seem to spend a lot of time BSing with them. To sum it up, there are a bunch of really nice people running this event: from the heads of the tourney right down to the volunteers. Our host family is also really great, too. Well, we need to rest up for our big games tomorrow, so until later!!!!!

Team MN 1

Team Update

2008-01-22T19:08:00.000-06:00

It has been a long time since the last blog...... sorry, we've all been busy. Well December and January have both been good for our team. We qualified in the Eveleth Cash, which was the first men's spiel our team has qualified in. We won our quarterfinals game against Shuster and lost in an extra end to Craig Brown. Overall, it was a great weekend. We played really well and beat some good teams.

We also won state at the end of December. We played four round robin games. The first two were against a couple of younger, unknown teams, and the other two were against Rootes of Chisholm and Tony (Montana) Wright of Duluth. After going four and zero in the round robin we were in the "1 v. 1" playoff game, which was basically just the state championship. We won that game pretty easily and successfully defended our state championship.

We played in Two Harbors this past weekend for the Two Harbors International. We beat a couple of local teams to make it to the finals where we played Ross (The Sheriff) Litmann. We beat him on the last shot of the game, and recorded our first men's spiel win as a team. It was another good spiel for us, putting us on a 10-0 run over two tournaments. We're now looking forward to Nationals where we hope to successfully defend as last year's champs. Wish us luck!

Scotland

2007-11-27T10:21:00.000-06:00

The trip to Scotland was a unique and fun experience. We arrived at Inverness on Tuesday night, and we were taken to our host family's house by some members of the organizing commitee. Our host family (Derek and Jenny) was amazing. They cooked for us every night, plus they had internet and a phone that we could call home on. We really lucked out on getting such a great family.

The curling went pretty well. We played well to get to the quarter finals, but then lost to pretty good Scottish team. That game was going how we needed it to, and we got a chance to score a big end. Chris' first rock picked, which left us with only two rocks in the house. The other team hit our open rock and left us with a free draw for two. I know that we still scored a deuce, but we had the end set up to get three or even four! When you play a team a good team like that, you usually only get one chance to break away, and that was it. What can you do though? Picks happen, as we know all too well! (I am referring to the tiebreaker game against Denmark last year.)

Inverness was a pretty cool town. We went shopping at the city center a couple of times, and we got to walk all over the town. I think we probably put on about 15 miles of walking during that trip! All of the buildings were really old, and there were no skyscrapers. The city was exactly how I pictured it would be, old school European. There was a river that ran through the middle of the town, which had a lot of shops and restaurants on it. We spent a lot of time down there. We got tons of good pictures, except for Aanders, cause his camera broke on the first day. Hopefully it is repairable. The only downside was that the dollar was so weak compared to the pound! It was pretty expensive to go there, but completely worth it.

Well, until next time, keep practicing that four foot weight!

Ottawa

2007-11-07T21:12:00.000-06:00

Hello all.....

We are back from Ottawa, Canada. It was a really exciting trip for us. We played a total of eight games over 60 hours, so we were all pretty tired by the end of the weekend. We all flew out pretty early on Thursday morning, and our flights met in Detroit. We were in Ottawa by early afternoon. (This was after a pretty bumpy flight into Ottawa on a 50 seat plane!!! Needless to say, Chris and I were hanging on for dear life!)

We started playing Friday morning, which was a really good day for us. We won three games, and made it to the "A" qualifier on Saturday morning. We lost that game. We are now officially 0-4 on curltv as a team...... haha. We won the "B" semifinal that afternoon, and lost the "B" qualifier that night. On Sunday, we finally qualified from the "C" bracket, and we made it to the semi's. (We were the only team to play in every qualifier that we could!)

The semi's didn't really go our way, and we lost. Overall, however, it was a pretty good weekend. We got to play a lot of games, and we got to meet a lot of new people. Plus, we made a little cash!!!

We are all getting ready for the next big trip, which is to Inverness, Scotland. Hopefully we can make a good showing there too. Well, I better get back to homework, (we are all frantically trying to keep/catch up!). The next time you hear from us will probably be from Scotland!!!

St. Paul Cashspiel

2007-10-14T17:39:00.000-05:00

Hello all....
Well our first weekend is officially over. We started Friday with a game against a team of Canadians, and we struggled to get anything going in our favor. We held in there for a while, but eventually they won. We then played a team from Minnesota, and things didn't go so hot again. They got a couple good wics, and we couldn't make a shot. The game ended in something like 8 ends. (On a side note, that team went on to beat a couple other good teams, so we didn't feel that bad.)

Saturday went way better than Friday. We played "Come on" Aileen Sormunen. We played really well, and we held control for most of the game. That was our only game that day.

Today (Sunday) went well also. We played the defending champs this morning, and we dominated most of the game. They commented that we beat them "junior style," but like Chris said, junior style must mean getting 4 in the 8th end to go up by 8. Hahaha. After that, we played Eric Fenson. We miss judged Chris's last rock in the first end, and we gave a up a steal of 3. We fought our way back from a four point deficit to one point down going into the last end. Unfortunately, we couldn't get a rock buried and couldn't generate the point we needed.

Overall, the weekend was productive. It was nice to get out there for the first time. We are planning a practice next weekend, and right now we're a little over two weeks till Ottawa. Stay tuned for more!

Welcome to the team blog

2007-10-01T23:47:00.000-05:00

Hello all,
We set up this blog to keep in contact with everyone during our season this year. We have a competitive schedule set up, which is going to take us to Ottawa, CA and Inverness, Scotland. Our goal this year is to sucessfully defend out Junior National Championship, and to hopefully medal at Worlds. We will keep you updated during and after our events, so stay tuned!!!