Monday, January 26, 2009

Bismarck or Bust!

Hello all.

Time for an update. For those of you recently added to this e-mail list, please feel free to catch up by reading the thread below.

Well we’re off to Bismarck tomorrow! We’ve all been hard at work at our respective jobs trying to get ahead or caught up as the case may be.
Of course we’ve all spent plenty of practice time on the ice as well. At this point in the season practice is more about maintenance than anything else. No major fixes or tweaks at this point. However, as part of my ongoing quest to relieve the minor back pain I experience from time to time, I did move to a new pair of curling shoes (yes, we have special shoes!). This seems to have helped a great deal. I am looking forward to not feeling quite as old! J

So now it’s time to “Leave it all on the ice” as they say. As I mentioned earlier, we need to finish in the top 4 of this field to advance to Denver. One game and one stone at a time, right?

I don’t have a specific schedule to tell you who we play and when, but I do know that the first game will be at 10:00 AM Central Time on Wednesday.

As usual there will be live scoring and standings posted on the USCA website at http://www.curlingrocks.net/. Once there, click on the “Championships” link at the top of the page. There should be something regarding scoring from the “Challenge Round” on the right side of the page.

Thanks again and wish us luck!

John

Monday, January 12, 2009

Now the meat grinder.....

First of all thanks to everyone for your awesome support by e-mail, text messages, phone calls and facebook posts! It’s really nice to know that so many people are watching and pulling for us.

We had a very good weekend but did come up one win short of going directly to Denver. We lost the qualifying game to the Chris Plys rink. Chris’s team is the reigning Jr. Men’s World Champion and are very good. They are from Duluth and Chris and John Shuster have played together as well so we were playing against familiar faces. In fact, that team seems to have our number this year as it was our third loss to them. Honestly, we just didn’t play very well that last game. Really too bad. So very close!

As you can imagine this one stings a bit so it will take a few days for us to rebound. But rebound we will! After all, we are advancing to the Challenge Round in Bismarck, ND in a couple of weeks. There are 29 other teams that are not advancing at all.

As I mentioned earlier the Challenge Round will feature 10 teams that, like us, just missed advancing from their sites. The interesting thing is that the list of teams for this event feature 5 of the top 6 teams in the country right now.

The Challenge Round teams:

P. Fenson – Multiple National Champ and Olympic Bronze Medalist
Disher – National Champ and 3 Time Runner-Up
Brown – Multiple National Champ (current)
Larway – Multiple National Champ
Shuster
Corbett
Wight
Hames
Lilla
Persinger

So as you can see this will be a “meat grinder” all very tough games. This will be a 10 team round robin (9 games) so we’ll have to play extremely well to make the top 4 to advance to Denver. More work to do!

Thanks again for the continued support. As we get closer to Bismarck, I’ll send you the information you’ll need to follow the action.

John Benton

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Okay, here's the scoop....

The #1 teams from each pool play for the spot to Denver. The loser of that game will go to the Challenge round.

The #2 teams from each pool play for the remaining spot to the Challenge round. The loser of this game is out (*** see the note below)

So as you can see there is a tie in both pools for 1st and 2nd.

Pool A
Brown 4-1
Shuster 4-1

Pool B
Plys 4-1
Lilla 4-1

So tomorrow morning at 9:00 am we will play a tie-breaker game against Brown and Plys and Lilla will do the same.

The winners will be the #1 teams from their pool and the losers will be th #2 teams. So we need to win two games tomorrow to go to Denver. If we go 1 and 1 we go to the Challenge round and 0-2 and we're out....kinda'.


*** Note: So you rember how all year I was saying that eventhough we didn't win a spiel that we earned important WCT points? Here's where they come in. Only 8 teams from the 4 sites qualify by win loss record for the Challenge round. So there are two additional spots available to the top two WCT points teams that have not already advanced to Denver. I know it's a bit complicated but suffice to say that we have a good chance of making it to the Challenge Round if things went horribly bad tomorrow (which it won't).

So for now we're resting at the room and will get some food.

Thanks to everyone for checking in! We really appreciate it. We'll go out and win both of those games tomorrow!

Have a good night and set your alarms for 9:00 AM!!!!

Hope this makes sense!

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

As promised, here’s the update for “The Road to Denver, then Vancouver!

Our first game in the Trials process is Thursday at 2:00 PM.

You can get the online scoring and watch our win/loss record here:

http://events.curlingzone.com/index.php?task=Event&eventid=2082&view=Scores&showdrawid=1

Remember that we need to finish in the top 3 to advance:

#1 goes directly to the Final trials in Denver
#2 and #3 go to the Challenge Round in Bismarck

Thanks again. Wish us luck.