Tuesday, June 09, 2009

A $25,000 Curling Refresh












TSN’s Kraft Celebration Tour will give no less than 10 lucky Canadian communities a $25,000 grant, aka “community refresh”, plus an onsite hosting of TSN’s live SportsCentre broadcast.

This is all in celebration of TSN’s 25th anniversary.

Nominations come from the public via this special website, and nominations close at 5:00pm eastern time this coming Friday, June 12.

We’ve noticed that one community has made an all-curling application.

The East Hants Curling Association in Lantz, Nova Scotia has been looking to build a four-sheet curling facility since 1988 (!) and geez, for pure stubborness alone, we think Lantz should make it into the top 10!

Don’t you?

Brier competitor (with Team Shawn Adams) and EHCA Director Kelly Mittelstadt is heavily involved in the drive for a curling club.

“We’ve secured government funding sufficient to allow conceptual drawings to be completed,” Mittelstadt told The Curling News.

“Once these drawings are finalized our next, and largest, hurdle will be getting funding from all three levels of government to build this facility.”

Here’s the EHCA nomination under which TCN readers are invited to comment – positively, of course!


What else for a Tuesday?

• There’s not much to say about the the appearance of curling on last night’s TV episode of The Bachelorette. The skill level was, of course, abysmal. One of the bachelors – who had clearly never stepped on ice before – declared the sport “terrifying.”

And to some surprise, the Canadian Curling Association sent out an email urging people to tune in to watch, prompting this blogger to wonder how the organization got her email address ...

Marie-France Larouche: skip et professeure?

• Yeah, yeah, yeah... everyone knows about the spoof story re. an IBM Supercomputer competing at the 2010 Worlds... but here’s the link in case you missed it ...

• And finally, Eric Deckers is the latest newbie to utter the obvious: Curling is Harder Than It Looks ...

3 comments:

Call me Paul said...

I'll never watch an episode of The Bachelorette, but from the clip shown on the blog to which you linked, I think that was excellent promotion for the sport. Sure, part of the show focused on the "funny" of the guys sucking at the sport, but in the end, they got serious (they had incentive), and they were shown having some success with only a minimum of training. And isn't that an important part of the message we'd like to get out to potential new curlers? You can successfully play this game almost immediately.

TCN said...

This point provokes more questions.

What is more valuable in terms of actual, eventual recruitment: high-performance game imagery on TV (particularly at the Olympics) or intro/recreational/comedic imagery on TV?

And how strong is the risk associated with intro/recreational/comedic imagery re. fostering "first impressions" that curling is "not a real sport"?

Regardless, any media observer will prolly agree that almost *any* TV promo is indeed excellent promo...

Call me Paul said...

At the club level, I'm just trying to get people in the door. The high calibre curling seen on TV may even scare off potential new curlers who are afraid of "sucking." I love to see positive depictions of the sport in which the participants are not pros. It seemed to me that the bachelors were having fun - and that's the most important thing we need to get out to newbies. This sport is fun!