Sept. 25, 2009

Training Ends with a Stellar Trip to Switzerland and the New Season Begins!

The team finished a long summer of training with an 8 day trip to Lucerne, Switzerland. Rodger Schmidt, one of our many coaches in the Team Around the Team (TATT), lives in Lucerne and runs a curling academy and makes ice for a few clubs as well. So it was a good choice for a getaway trip for us to finalize our training.

We arrived in Switzerland and got settled in our small but comfortable hotel / apartment. The following seven days were filled with physical training sessions, on ice training, and scrimmages with Swiss, Austrian, and Czech teams. We usually spent at least six hours a day in training. We did get a little free time to check out the beautiful sites of the mountains and Lake Lucerne. We even found time to fit in a round of golf in one of the most beautiful places we’ve ever played. Hard to beat playing golf with good friends on top of a mountain! All in all, the trip was very successful and set us up well to start the season.

On that note, the season begins in September with our longest road trip as a team leading up to the Olympics in February. We’ll spend 21 days on the road together beginning with the Shorty Jenkins Classic in Brockville, Ontario. This event is the official start to the World Curling Tour season and should give us a good test to start the year.

From Ontario, we’ll fly directly to Oslo, Norway for the Oslo Cup which is a major event on the European Curling Tour. Getting some experience against top European competition will be important for us heading into Vancouver.

We then fly back to Lucerne for a few days to debrief and review the first two events before heading for Basel, Switzerland for the Swiss Cup. This is another high level event on the European Curling Tour.

We are really looking forward to this trip, though many of us have not been away from home, family, and work for this amount of time. We’re looking forward to a good start to the season with this extended road trip!