PG Tips February

In case you haven't been following President Gavin's musings throughout the year - they are published monthly in the Ayr Curling Club Section - I have also published the latest edition as a news item.

My thanks to Gavin for his thoughts, which have always been entertaining and quite often very interesting!

Firstly, allow some self indulgence on my part   I'm writing this just after Billy won the Scottish mixed at Aberdeen -he was in Kyle Smiths team with Hannah Fleming  and Alice Spence. This will go some way to making up for him not being on the starting line up in the New Year Bonspiel . This is the first "grown up" title billy and the group he grew up with has won  and they are now hitting an interesting stage , among this team they have  7 scottish junior winners titles but are now all aged out and also all finishing university , it feels like the end of an era for jean and me after running, watching,enjoying and delivering Billy and his gang of junior curlers round to all the competitions for the last nearly 10 years , who knows where life will take them over the next few years , and as for Jean and I , well Lucy has just formed her first under 17 team so it looks like we are going to do it all over again and for that we could not be happier . 

              Lots has happened since the burns supper , the rink continues to be very busy with curling , skating and ice hockey!

Thanks to all who have played in the many inter club matches ,I have had a big pool of players willing to play and have  tried to accommodate as many people as possible. I hope you all enjoyed yourselves win or lose . The best quote I received, was after one of the games played against murrayfield, from Hubert -I had heard that Edinburgh stalwart Walter Brown (Scottish seniors Champion 1996 , my dad was in the team) was coming down to play so I decided to match them against some of our more experienced curlers, Hubert , Dad , Ellie Branch and Mima  Strang ,  Walter won by a shot and a disgruntled Hubert came to me and said " you said our opposition was going to be over 80 years old ... he's only 79!!! "  

I have had loads of opportunity to curl at other ice rinks throughout the season and I can tell you that there is lots of dodgy ice out there .  We are all looking for keen ice with draws on each hand , a good temperature of ice hall , no iced up stones , clear lines , even running stones, attention to detail is key to all of this! I think that our ice is usually pretty good,  especially as it is so busy with skating . The ice rinks that don't have any skating have generally better ice, but not always ! what is true however,  is, the better the ice staff the better the ice, so we need to continue with the training of our staff and keep improving on our working practices of recent years . 

I really enjoyed presidents day , thanks to all who took part , it ran smoothly after the  confusion of my play system but eventually the presidents team prevailed over the vice presidents team , the days winning rink was skipped by Robert Anderson just to prove his win In the Scottish seniors was no fluke ( well done team Prentice and congratulations to Robert Clark chosen as fifth man in Dumfries ) . I raised £250 in my "fines" jar for rowdy and abusive behaviour, and well done to Johnny Johnstone and Alex Connell for putting a large chunk of it in because of their heckling , the funds will go to Click Sargent , as Jean and I  are part of Ally,s army doing the kilt walk at the end of April.

                 Well done again to Scott Andrews he represented Ayr magnificently as part of the British Olympic curling team , the performance has brought "try curling " people into ice rinks in their droves , I thought the curling coverage on telly throughout the Olympics was great ,Jackie Lockart and Steve Cram portrayed our game very well,  although Steve was getting carried away with himself with comments like , "he's got an easy double here" ,and" looks like a simple draw to the 4 foot " , obviously doesn't play and know how hard it is . 

That's all for now ,better go and get the Maxwell teams organised , well done to Ayr ladies for winning the Morton a big achievement when you consider there were 17 teams taking part initially, whilst this year the men's equivalent competition "The Maxwell " had only 7 teams  starting (still hard to win)  Good  luck Robert  A and Robert C  in the world seniors in Dumfries ,let's try and get down there to support him . PG