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Wednesday, April 27, 2022

LOOKING BACK: Returning to the grassroots: confessions of a busy curling writer

I'm waking up this blog! 

I left my job at Curling Canada in 2019, just after my first Young Adult book was published. Since then, my writing life has been all about writing fiction for teens, and my curling life has been about playing at the club, leading Learn To Curls, and watching all those curlers on TV that I used to write about - everything from club bonspiels to national and international events. (Well, and then there was that time spent staying home because there was a global pandemic, of course...) 

In other words, I'm a working author and a curling fan with a bit of inside knowledge. 

But there's some good stuff on this blog from days gone by, so I'll pick and choose a little bit of content to share and, I hope, write some new stuff, too. Lots going on in the curling world these days, and hey, I could talk (and write) curling all day. So, here we go, a look back to April 2013, as my curling season wrapped up. (Note: The links are a little clunky, but they still work!)

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April 2013

Because my day job is editing and writing stories for the CCA website, this blog – which I always intended to be my place to write about All Things Curling – has been neglected.

The view from the media bench during
the final of the 2013 Scotties in Kingston.
But the season has pretty well come to an end for me. The events are done, the regular columns I write and edit are done, and I am subsiding into maintenance mode.

It was a terrific season, full of great stories on and off the ice. Here's a sample of the more grassroots-type stories I worked on during the 2012-2013 curling season:

The 13-year-old blogger in Kingston who has become curling’s biggest fan

Some savvy curling club managers who keep things hopping at their clubs – Scott Comfort, in Wadena, Sask. And Bobby Ray in North Bay, Ont.

The growth of wheelchair curling at the first-ever national summit on the sport, and Andy Jones, a curling coach from Alberta who has lots to say about the coaching side of wheelchair curling.


The Minister of State (Sport), the Honourable Bal Gosal took to the ice at the Ottawa Curling Club last Fall with Rachel Homan, Craig Savill and coach Earle Morris to see what curling was all about (and he did great, apparently!).

There were anniversaries at Annandale, and Chatham, and Vancouver.

But even though the ice is out, that doesn’t mean the sport sleeps during the summer. There are summer spiels coming up, and clubs doing renovations, and changes to some of the high-performance teams (here’s a great piece by Bob Weeks on the recent departure of John Morris from the Kevin Martin team.)

Lots of news still coming down the pipe from all over the country and the world. So the focus is now on sharing more stories over the summer. Stories about curling - especially the grassroots!