Rhinelander Curling Club men’s and women’s teams gain experience at nationals

The Arena Club National Championships Oct. 14-19 in Las Vegas gave the Rhinelander Curling Club men’s and women’s teams a chance to take on the best in the country.

The Rhinelander men’s and women’s teams went a combined 0-10. However, it was the overall experience that they took away.

    The Rhinelander Curling Club men’s team, from left, Rick Peterson, Peter Chladil, Randy Louis and Joe Ross played at the Arena Club National Championships Oct. 14-19 in Las Vegas. (Boz Bloom/Contributed)
  

“It was different than any other curling experience I’ve ever had in my curling career,” men’s skip Peter Chladil said. “Most curling events are very casual and party-like atmosphere, a very social sport, but this was kind of all business. Overall being in Las Vegas is one thing because of all the things that are available to do out there. (I) had a great time from that standpoint, met some other really great curlers from around the country and it’s a memory I’ll have with me the rest of my life.”

“I think the women’s team for the most part really enjoyed being part of that event,” women’s skip Jean Rice said. “Just quite the experience for a very new club, and in our case, I and Tykie Wescott both have some past experience with curling, but the other two gals on the team plus our alternate so Hannah (Beeler), Judy (Lehman) and Amber (Louis) are all really new to curling within these last two years. So it was, again, quite enlightening for all of us to be part of a national-level event like this was cool.”

The men’s team consisted of members Chladil, vice skip Randy Louis, lead Rick Peterson and second Joe Ross.

    The Rhinelander Curling Club women’s team, from left, Jean Rice, Tykie Wescott, Hannah Beeler, Judy Lehman and Amber Louis played at the Arena Club National Championships Oct. 14-19 in Las Vegas. (Boz Bloom/Contributed)
  

The women’s team consisted of second Hannah Beeler, lead Judy Lehman, alternate Amber Louis, Rice and vice Tykie Wescott.

Chladil noted how different the curling competitions were with a clock. The Arena Club National Championships enforced thinking time, something new to Rhinelander.

“Normally we don’t time ourselves and have to make shots by a clock or anything like that, and it was all timed and all very structured, and that was a different feeling, well for me and my team, because we’ve never been through that before,” he said. “You get 30 minutes for your entire game to think about and make your shots, and we kind of have the same thing in regular curling. You’re supposed to keep the game moving and try to keep it to two hours, but at a championship like this they enforce it. So once the opponent’s shot ends up down in the house, your thinking time starts. All the time that you’re trying to set up your next shot and think about it, the clock is running and then as soon as you deliver your next shot, it stops. It’s just different.”

Another thing that Chladil noticed was the practice time.

“The other thing that we normally don’t do you have a time to practice,” he said. “So you get 10 minutes to throw rocks before the game starts for practice and then to determine who gets the last shot of the first end of the game, you do what’s called a warm draw, and that’s throwing a clockwise and a counterclockwise shot back down to the house and whoever gets closest with those two shots, we call it the button, but the pin, the center of the house, they get the, we call it the hammer, the last stone of the first end. The ones who get the closest get the hammer for that first end. So it’s just different. Normally that’s determined — we flip a coin at the curling club. So it is very much more structured than regular curling.”

Both the Rhinelander men and women noted how experience and time on the ice can factor in when playing at a national tournament.

“Having to play in a bonspiel-type tournament, you just learn strategy of the game and watching the other teams strategy and how they opted to play that next rock in order to improve their position or perhaps block our next shot what have you,” Rice said. “Again, just having being able to play five games within three days time was really helpful, I think, just made us more aware of all the factors that come into play in a curling match. Again, they say it’s a game of chess. Every move changes what the next shot should be and how to play it.”

“We missed shots that we needed to make, and we did not make those shots,” Chladil said. “So yes to good competition, but we also didn’t make the shots that we needed to make to keep us in the game and score points. That’s part of it. The rest of my team or this will just be their third year of curling coming up. They’re all new curlers, and I’ve been curling steadily for 11 years and probably 10 years before that off and on just going to bonspiels and what not once or twice a year.”

Geoff Goodland made the trip as a coach for Rhinelander.

“Geoff Goodland is a core member of our group and has lots of experience curling for decades and came along as a coach for both the men’s and women’s team,” Rice said. “It was wonderful to have him there to help give us some insight on to how to play this specific shot or in general what he’s been seeing as far as how the ice was reacting.”

The Rhinelander men played Wine Country Curling Club, Salt Lake Curling Club, Aksarben from Omaha, Nebraska, a team from Alaska and Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

“(Our game against the team from Alaska) was our closest game,” Chladil said. “Like us, they have outdoor ice so they can’t curl all summer. They had to drive 2 1/2 hours to Fairbanks, Alaska to some dedicated ice to curl on. So it’s not easy for them either.”

The Rhinelander women took on Rocket City Curling Club out of Huntsville, Alabama, a Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas team, a team from Cleveland, Ohio, the Last Chance Curling Club out of Helena, Montana and a team out of Boise, Idaho.

“That was interesting to find out most of these arena teams, so they share ice as well with hockey arenas, are in larger cities, and so I was thinking, ‘Oh, they probably are able to use the ice a little more often than we can here in Rhinelander,’ but that doesn’t seem to be the case,” Rice said. “Our timeframe to use the ice is Sunday nights and Monday mornings. For most of those other arena clubs, they also said there were maybe two or three times within a given week that they had ice available to them. So they face the same challenges as we do, but indeed, most of them have been in existence for much longer than the Rhinelander Curling Club.”

The Rhinelander women came close to winning one of their five games.

“I think just the huge, huge benefit to be able to play with these other gals in five separate games and build on our strengths and how well we were able to say, read the ice and play each shot more efficiently and effectively as the week went by, but again, we had a couple really close matches,” Rice said. “I think we scared the team that ultimately took, I think, third out of the women’s grouping, but they were seeded second. We were ahead up until the last two ends. They beat us by two points. It was a really fun match and helped certainly encouraged us, gave us some confidence to finish up the three additional games we had so it was good.”

The focus turns to the local curling league where Rhinelander hopes to get more teams.

“Right now we are simply focused on getting back into our league play,” Rice said. “Through our league play group those who are feeling good about this curling thing and sign up as members and commit to being part of our regular group of curlers I’d love to see, yes, teams of four people whether it’s a women’s, a men’s, a mixed, etc. signing up for other tournaments in the region to go have that experience of playing three to four games in a couple days just to build on that skillset.”

Learn2Curls are available for people looking to try curling for the first time. 

“If anybody’s interested in trying curling, we do Learn2Curls every Sunday night and Monday mornings at the (Rhinelander) Ice Arena 6 o’clock and 9 o’clock Monday mornings, and everybody should come out and try curling,” Chladil said. “It’s a great sport. It’s a very social sport. It’s also a sport kind of like golf where you can do it the rest of your life. We have members that are well into their mid- and upper-70s that still curl with us, and it’s a great thing, and it’s a great thing to do in winter particularly up here cause winters can be long.”

Rice wanted to thank the businesses that donated to help with the cost of the trip.

“Those were wonderful sources to help us ... take care of some of those expenses for the nine folks that came along as part of the teams to play out in Vegas,” she said.

When spring rolls around, Rhinelander is hoping to be back in the playdowns for a chance to go back to the Arena Club National Championships, which will be in a new location next year.

“We’ll keep curling and curl together as our schedules allow and keep practicing, keep getting better,” Chladil said. “So probably next February, we’ll start to get some extra ice time together, maybe throw in a couple extra practice sessions because our playdown will probably be again at the end of March. So get tuned up for that and kind of go from there and see what happens.”

Brett LaBore may be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].