Q's & A's

In this episode of "A Pane In The Glass Podcast" I attempt to answer questions & respond to some comments that have come my way. Those questions & comments included Olympic medals for coaches, the role of officials, between ends team discussions, rock matching, hats & T-shirts (it's actually a good question), rock measuring instruments, take out weights, going undefeated and the relationship curling has with the Olympic Games. Use "Chapters" above these show notes to go directly to the questions that might interest you most! Enjoy!

Transcript

Medals to Olympic Coaches

Role Of Officials

Between Ends Team Discussions

Rock Matching

Hats & T-shirts

Rock Measuring Instruments

Take Out Weights

Going Undefeated

Curling's Relationship With The Olympics

Speaker 0:16

Welcome to another episode of a Pain in the Glass Podcast. This is your host, Bill Tschirhart, Chartered Professional Coach with Coaches of Canada. Once again coming to you from my home in Grand Bend, Ontario, Canada, on the ancestral land of the Kettle and Stony Point First Nations. Well, as you saw from the show notes, it's Q's and A's. Or I could have called it Mailbag Edition. There have been a number of questions sent my way. And again, if you have questions or comments, you can do it in one of two ways, sending them to me through email, coachbill at hey.net. That's coachbill at hey.net. Or by clicking on the hyperlink at the end of the show notes, it's your turn, and that will send the message to me. The difference being that if you use the hyperlink, I have no idea who you are. And if you'd like to preserve your privacy, that's certainly the way to do it. If you send an email to me, well, we may be able to converse back and forth on it. So, anyway, as I said, it's Mailbag, and we have a number of really good questions out there. So let's get right to it. This question came to me from Tom of Peterborough, and he wondered about Olympic medals. Specifically, he wanted to know if coaches get Olympic medals, bronze, silver, or gold. Well, the direct and short answer to that question, Tom, is no. Medals go only to the athletes. Now, that may sound a little unfair, perhaps, and as a coach, um, I might feel that, oh gee, don't I deserve a medal? Well, I may deserve a medal, as if I can speak for all the coaches. The problem is that some of the athletes, uh perhaps more individual athletes possibly, will have a variety of support staff. They may have a technical coach, a sports psychologist, a nutritionist, an exercise physiologist, well, etc., etc., etc. So where does the International Olympic Committee draw the line? Well, they drew the line simply, medals go only to the athletes. So, Tom, that's it. That's the answer to that question. But that said, at one time, if I have this correct, a friend, a dear friend, Jim Waite, who has been at a number of Olympic games, and I think I remember Jim one time saying that coaches got certificates of some sort, but that would have been quite some time ago, and I'm just guessing on that. So, Jim, if you're listening, let me know if I was right. So, medals just to the athletes. Thanks, Tom. Good question. Samantha from Vernon, British Columbia asked the question about the role of officials. Well, I just assumed uh Samantha's question was about curling officials. Well, if you've watched television, you have seen them uh sitting beside the scoreboards. And they uh have a number of tasks, actually. They do a lot more than just watch the game, and if rocks happen to hit sideboards and they're asked if the the rock did hit the sideboard, they could possibly explain that that it did. But before the game, they look after the pregame practice sessions. At the end of the day, when teams can come back to the venue for late night practice, the officials will be there, they take turns doing this. So there are a number of number of other tasks. But their main role, I think this is what Samantha's question was all about, their job is to help the players apply the rules. They are not there to penalize indiscretions or rule infractions, if I could say it that way. Uh, that's not their task. Uh, they're there to help the players, and I think that's the best way to answer that question, Samantha. Now, in other sports, the role of the officials are really quite different. So if you take a more robust contact sport like hockey, I have a very definite statement about that, because in a game like that, where the health and safety of the athletes is a factor, it has always been my view that the most important role of the officials is to protect the health and safety of those athletes. You may say, well, isn't that that inherent in applying the rules of the game? Well, yes, it is, but uppermost in the minds of the officials should be the health and safety of the athletes. I remember one incident one time back when Canada had a national men's uh hockey team, so it's been a few years. The uh coach of the team, and I will call him Fred, it's what wasn't his real name. There was a game in which the Canadian national men's team participated, and to say that the game got out of hand from a physical perspective would have been putting it mildly. After the game, Fred calmly knocked on the door of the officials and went in and just made one statement. He said, Gentlemen, tonight you did not protect the health and safety of the athletes. Closed the door and left. And he was right because I watched that game, and they did not protect the health and safety of the athletes. So, Samantha, that's what I see as the role of the officials. This next question came through the hyperlink to which I referred at the beginning of the episode, so I have no idea who the individual was, but they wanted to know about the between end conversations that take place among the members of the team. Well, I can give you a generic answer to that. I would hope that they would ask themselves uh the some questions and supply the answers, and here's a big one from my perspective, and I would always suggest to teams they do this every two ends. The question, what's the ice telling us? Because the ice will always try to talk to you, and it will give you very vivid answers if you pay attention. But if you never ask the question, what's the ice telling us, you're not going to get any information that could be critical in making curling shots. And I know that that's what many teams do. The other question that they will pose to themselves in that little huddle is how are we going to start the next end? Now, I I'm a little sensitive to that. How are we going to start the next end business? Because the the strategy and tactics workshop that I've talked about on a few occasions, episodes of the podcast, talks about a color system. Green, red, and yellow. So if a team decides, based on end score last rock advantage, that it's a good idea to begin the end pursuing a scoring opportunity, they all they have to do is say, well, green. If they feel, on the other hand, that it's time to protect against a scoring threat, for whatever reason or reasons, they simply agree to start playing that end red. Or if they feel that they're at that particular point of the game where they're promoting a scoring opportunity or protecting against a scoring threat is not uh an issue at the time, they may decide just to position rocks carefully and as the end unfolds, decide, wait, there's a scoring opportunity here and switch to playing green, or gee, there's a definite scoring threat here. We're gonna have to put to protect against that. So that's certainly some of the things that they will talk about. And on a more generic level, they may just want to get together and talk about how things are going. Uh are we are we still feeling good about uh ourselves? Are are we are we playing up to our potential? So that's where it gets a little bit ambiguous from my perspective. So the two things that I mentioned about uh the strategy and and tactics and about the ice. And and the other thing perhaps um I might throw in there is from a strategy perspective, uh, okay, for this next end, what do we want from the end? What uh is acceptable from the end, from a score perspective, obviously, and what's unacceptable. So that's something else they might talk about. What do we want from the end? What's acceptable, and what's not acceptable. And of course that's tied in with the whole green, red, and yellow. So whoever sent in that question was a really good one, and that's the answer that I from Toronto asked about rock matching. And it's it's a very important topic, perhaps more important to some teams at their level of skill and experience, perhaps to a recreational team, uh, it's maybe not quite so important. But rock matching, really just what the term implies, that the two rocks that you have to play in in the game in each end, seemed to be matched in terms of speed and curl. So that if you apply a velocity out of the hack with the same amount of forward motion, let's say, to each of the rocks that you have, that they would basically go the same distance down the ice. But of course, the other aspect is the amount of curl. So they may be matched as far as speed is concerned, but maybe not curl. One may curl more than the other. So certainly the teams that you see playing on television, rock matching is very important. They will spend the pre-competition day matching rocks as best they possibly can, and in and during the competition itself, they'll have a rock book and they will record rocks red or yellow, you know, sheet A, B, or C, and the number of the rocks, and those rocks books can be uh quite detailed and uh certainly a very valuable tool in the way that the team plays. Now, if you're going to match rocks, uh just from a generic perspective, you need to deliver each of the rocks that you're trying to match. You need to deliver the two rocks with the same speed, and if you have a laser speed trap, that certainly takes care of that down the same path. That's very important as well. And here is the really important criterion criterion, I should say, that's rotation. So if you deliver one rock with the with a certain velocity and the next rock with a certain velocity down the same path, but you applied three rotations with one and six rotations with the other, well, you should not expect those two rocks to end up in exactly the same place. There was one team, uh, going back to yesteryear. I don't want to identify the team. This was long before the draw shot challenge came into play here to see who gets last rock in the first end. You could do whatever you wanted. It was, you know, back when we were flipping coins to see who got last rock in the first end. And this team, which was one of the best teams in the world, they would spend the entire warm-up. Yes, you heard that correctly. They would take the entire warm-up to find a pair of rocks for the skip. And this this individual said to me one time, Bill, we were sure at the end of a warm-up period, and the skip selected the two rocks, that the rest of the us on the team, we were pretty sure they were not matched. But our skip thought they were, and that's all that's important. And and and that's having confidence in the rocks that you're delivering. So there's a sort of a uh rock matching 101. So good question, really good question, Terry, about rock matching. So thank you for that. Now, here's an interesting question because not very many people would think about this, and it came from Cindy in La Belle Provence, and she wanted to know about the t-shirts and hats that championship teams seem to wear within uh a minute or two after a championship is won. Well, were how did they know that they were going to win? Well, of course, they didn't know that they were going to win, Cindy. The other team had t-shirts and hats as well. So our question basically is, well, where do the hats and t-shirts go that uh are not going to be worn by the losing team? Well, I'm very pleased to say that those uh garments, the hats and the t-shirts and any other uh gear that might have said, you know, champions, uh, that goes to charities, to uh uh charities that deal with people that appreciate uh getting that kind of attire. So that was a really good question, and I'm I'm very pleased to pass that along. So the teams that lose, well, they benefit uh people in another way. Yeah, really good question, Cindy. I have a confession to make here because the next question came from someone who lives in a place that I think has just one of the best names in all of Canada. Well, I think there are two places that have really cool names, and one is Golden British Columbia. But Brenda happens to live in the other place, uh, whose name I think is is just off the charts great. Brenda lives in Annapolis, Royal, Nova Scotia. Like, think about that. Annapolis Royal. Is there a more elegant name for a town? I think it's great. So this was Brenda's question, and she's an avid follower of curling on television, and she wondered about rock measuring. Uh, not the protocol, because I've talked about that in other episodes, but just the instruments that were used for that. And and I'll use the technical term. What you see on television is a type of micrometer, and I don't have to explain how it works, because you've seen how it works, and it's designed for one purpose and one purpose only, to compare the distance from rocks to the pin. It could be uh involve two rocks or three rocks or more, but it's just to compare. It's a mechanical device, and you see how the dial moves as the micrometer arm uh scrapes across the striking bands, and you see that oh, it went past the four or not quite up to the five or whatever it happens to be. And the overhead camera can catches that, and you can almost be a participant in the measurement. But there's another measuring device, and and the technology is quite different. It's a laser measure, and its job takes place before uh the the television uh coverage begins. It determines how exactly how far a rock is, like one rock, that's the difference here. Just one rock that comes to rest, and the officials need to know how far it is from the pin to the nearest part of that rock, and it it gives the distance in in centimeters, and and and I'm I'm not exactly sure the degree of accuracy, to be quite honest, and millimeters, but it's it's very precise, but it's only used for that purpose, and and those are laser measures. So uh that's the answer to the question. The micrometers are used to just simply compare distances, but of course you don't know what exactly what the distance happens to be or distances, but it doesn't matter, it's just the comparison. Whereas the laser measures give the distance to a very minute degree of accuracy, and it's used in the draw shot challenge to determine who has last drop in the first end. So, another really good question. I mentioned at the beginning of the episode that not everything was a question looking for an answer. There were some comments, and this was the first comment, and again it came from someone who used the hyperlink. This individual noticed, and it's a very uh uh astute observation from my perspective, but they noticed that the teams that are playing at the highest level, unless it's a peel, in which case they would use, you know, pretty much full takeout weight, although this they're not taking rocks out, they're peeling. But takeouts where rocks are being removed from play, you don't very often see sort of full takeout weight. It's it's you know, hack to board up. And there's a reason for that. I think the reasons are fairly obvious. Now remember, these are uh athletes and teams that are very high they're very skilled. But it's important that when in most cases when you're taking a rock out, you want your shooter, maybe not just to remain in play, but you want your shooter to after removing the rock from the house, you don't have to knock it into next week just out of the house. And you want that shooter to perhaps roll to a certain location. Well, they will use bored up weight because the margin for error, if I can use that term, for rolling out, is much bigger if you have softer weight than if you've got that full takeout weight, because the margin of error is very much smaller. But it also has to do with the impact that brushing can have. So if you're throwing vapor trail takeout weight, uh the brushing is that even if you've got world-class brushers, is going to be somewhat minimized. Whereas if you're delivering that I'm sorry to sound repetitive here, that bored up weight, especially with the knowledge that we have now about brushing. And you may want to listen to last week's episode where Dr. Glenn Pauley and I talk about brushing, but with the softer takeout weight, the brushing can have a much greater impact. So that was a really good observation, whoever you are. And so that's my take on it. And I would suggest over the Summer, with your team, you might want to talk about the kind of takeout weight that you're employing and take a page from what you see. The really good teams on television. This next comment came from a regular uh contributor of questions to the podcast, uh, Leslie Girard. And Leslie uh has a bit of a uh a B in uh their bonnet. They talked about teams that end a round robin or round robin and most of the playoffs get to a final or gold medal game undefeated. And they're playing a team that, of course, is not undefeated, but both teams are playing for that top prize. And so Leslie felt that that's a little bit unfair because now that team that's undefeated puts everything on the line and the only thing they can do is lose. Or the team that they're playing well the phrase that Leslie uses, and it's one that I use from time to time, that team is playing with house money because well, they might have lost one or two or mep maybe even three games up to that point. And and so the the point that Leslie was making, should it not be that if a team gets to the final undefeated, they should have to be beaten twice. I don't think Leslie was asking if I was going to concur with that, but I'll uh I would be less than dishonest if I didn't say anything, but I definitely concur with that. Now, I mentioned to Leslie in reply that they would get all kinds of pushback from sponsors and and media, that how how can you uh promote a final game if it may not be a final game? Well, the reply that uh I would have to that is, well, it doesn't seem to bother the National Hockey League, doesn't seem to bother the National Basketball Association, doesn't seem to uh bother Major League Baseball because uh they're never sure if it's going to be the last game, the the the championship game. And if I recall, the curling trials was a best of three, so there was no guarantee that it was going to end uh after two games or three games. Uh so uh a very good comment, and and I guess I share with Leslie the uh the view on that. So I wonder how you feel about it. Teams going undefeated. Now, the remedy to that, and I now I will kick in with my own, I much prefer uh a knockout. Now, that's going to be impractical in some competitions, but the term that I like to use is the investment in the game. Because when you get to that final game, again, with the team that's undefeated and another team that's lost one, two, or three games en route to there, they they really don't have the same investment in the game. And and a round robin always sounds like a the best way to uh run a competition. Well, isn't that the fairest that uh that it could possibly be? You know, you play everybody. Well, round robin's around robins, sorry, first day with the new teeth, they they start out that way. They're very fair, and they they seem that way, but they don't often finish up that way. And I'm referring to the fact that at the end of a round robin, two teams may be in very different uh situations. One team may be out, uh uh didn't win enough games, they know they're not going to make the playoffs, and they're playing a team that's life and death to stay in the playoffs. Do those two teams have exactly the same investment in the game? Well, no, they don't. Now, will the team that uh is uh is out roll over and die for the the team that needs the game? Well, of course not. It's called pride of performance, and if I may, it really, really bothers me when I hear a commentator refer to a team that's in that position, that they don't have a playoff spot, so they're going to play spoiler. That is demeaning. And and I think a commentator that uses that term um should uh well, I won't be over the top here. Uh I was about to say they should be ashamed of themselves, but maybe that's a little bit harsh. But I don't I don't think that's that's fair. I don't think that's an accurate way. It's demeaning to say that a team's you know just gonna be a spoiler. No, they're trying to win a game, and they're gonna play as hard as they can because they owe it to themselves, and they also owe it to all the other teams in the competition. So if you're ever in a position to be a commentator, I hope you never use the word spoiler. With the Olympics still a very vivid memory, uh, the Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina, especially where curling is concerned, there were a number of individuals who sent emails to me about the situation uh in regard to the uh rather unfortunate incident between uh Oscar Erickson and Mark Kennedy. And I I have referred to this already, but I'll I'll say something about it again here to end off this episode. I'm gonna uh preface this by talking about someone I'm not gonna mention this person's name, who I I don't know if there's anybody I respect more in the the game of curling than this person, who was instrumental in helping and I think was a real force in getting curling into the Winter Olympic Games as a full metal sport. And certainly uh a measure of pride uh should be uh credited to this individual for playing the role that they did in getting curling into the Olympic Games. But after all the uh decision making was completed and the announcement was made, this person came to me and I congratulated them for the work that they had done. And this interval turned to me and said, Bill, I just have one concern. The Olympic tail might be wagging the curling dog. The Olympic tail might be wagging the curling dog. And at the time when this individual said that, I wasn't exactly sure what they meant, but I know now the the prize can be too important, and sometimes instead of bringing the best out in individuals, it does exactly the opposite. And I think that's what happened with the situation to which I referred earlier. It it also brought out the absolute worst in social media because of the way that it was handled. And there was that old expression that sometimes bad publicity is better than none at all. Well, I don't uh I don't agree with that. Uh we have we play a very special sport where we're sportsmanship um and integrity and the the the uh fellowship among all of us who play this game. But when that Olympic prize uh uh is on the horizon, uh sometimes the prize becomes more important than that the first part of the rule book. Um of course that's the code of ethics. And so it was unfortunate. Uh I certainly didn't concur that the whole business of bad publicity is better than none at all. No, I would rather that that not had happened. And I and the two individuals to whom I referred, I think, would feel the same. Uh they're they're very good friends. They they will remain good friends. It was just something that happened kind of in the heat of the moment. But as my friend said, the Olympic tail at that moment was wagging Curling's dog. Well, I hope you agree that those were very good questions that were posed my way. Maybe the questions were better than my answers, so I did my best. If at any time you would like to send something my way, as I said at the beginning of the episode, uh email coachbill at hey.net or by clicking on the hyperlink. It's your turn at the end of the show notes. So until next time, my friends, stay safe and don't forget about that great North American philosopher Charlie Brown. Don't focus too much on things that make you sad because there are so many things that can make you happy. Until next time.