By: Nolan Thiessen, Chief Executive Officer, Curling Canada
"The greatest danger is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." — Michelangelo
If you’ve curled long enough, you’ve almost certainly experienced it — you’re in the hack, looking at what appears to be a straightforward shot that you’ve thrown countless times before. For me that’s an outturn guard.
Normally the throw is routine — I’ve done it over and over. Get set. Quick visualization and then slide out and let it go … and it stops where it’s supposed to. But we’ve also had that occasional sinking feeling, when you’ve let it go, looked up and realized, “hey, that stone is curling too early” … “is that light?” … “wait, is this going to hog?” Panic sets in. You might owe a round of drinks, or you might have the embarrassment of Vic Rauter returning from a commercial break saying, “Alberta is chasing this end as lead Nolan Thiessen hogged his first stone of the end.”
You missed the shot. You threw it exactly as you thought you wanted to, but you missed by a mile. The first instinct is to ask, “What did I do wrong?” but then your teammate comes sliding down and says, “it’s not as fast as it was … the ice changed.”
The conditions had changed. But we all know that the most successful teams aren’t the ones that pretend nothing changed. They’re the ones that recognize it first, learn from their miss, and do what it takes to be successful thereafter. Leaders are the same. Leaders don’t just do what has always been done they look around the corner to see what is coming and best prepare for that.
Chapter three
The Truth We've Been Avoiding
Strong is not the same as sustainable.
The conditions have changed
The reality is Canadian curling is standing in that very moment and as leaders we need to look beyond the corner or re-read the ice.
Not because we’ve suddenly become less capable. Not because the game has become less meaningful. But because the conditions around us have changed. We all lament many of the changes as it’s not in the playbook, but the first step is to acknowledge that it has changed.
Communities that we serve are different. Families live different lives. People move around the country for work and life more freely and are increasingly congregating in more urban centres. What it means to be a volunteer means something different today than it did in the past. Funders ask different questions and demand more from organizations. Participants expect different experiences, or experiences tailored to their wants. Technology has altered almost every aspect of how people connect with one another and interact with the outside world. Yet too often we continue to evaluate today’s challenges using yesterday’s metrics. It’s easy to do but it’s precarious.
Resilience is not strategy
The curling system in Canada has always been tough and resilient.
When a club needed painting, volunteers did it. When the compressor failed, someone knew someone who could fix it and give us a “good deal”. When money was tight, another fundraising auction was organized and the community pitched in to share the burden. When the ice technician retired, somebody new stepped forward.
That spirit of resilience built this sport and should be cherished for all it did and how it carried us to today. But it also created an unintended consequence — extraordinary resilience can hide extraordinary pressure.
If volunteers always find a way, we may never recognize how much they are carrying.
If clubs somehow balance another difficult budget with little cuts here and there, we may never ask whether the system itself is sustainable and if we’re creating a death by a thousand cuts operating model.
If leaders continually solve today’s crisis’s only without an eye to the north star, tomorrow’s challenges quietly grow larger and more urgent.
Resilience is a remarkable quality, but it is not a strategy that will maintain curling for generations to come.
Curling has become exceptionally good at being resilient and surviving, but we must become equally good at preparing and being malleable.
Survival is adapting and coping with today’s issues and asking, “How do we get through this season?”
Preparation is accumulating resources to be self-sufficient and be able to respond quickly. It’s asking, “What must we do so that future generations don’t face the same struggle?”
Those are very different questions and very different ways of thinking and being. Survival is hard but preparation is even harder and takes more conviction.
Being so resilient that we always survive and never prepare leads to the truth that most deserves our attention. For decades, curling has quietly provided and generated enormous value for Canadian society and yet we undervalue its place in Canadian society.
Curling is a multi-generational activity that keeps people active from youth to late in life. Curling creates leaders at all levels of sport and skills that can be used in all facets of life. Curling develops coaches, officials and athletes. Curling inspires national pride through international success. Curling strengthens communities.
Few sports touch so many aspects of Canadian life and share so many Canadian values. Yet we rarely speak about curling in those terms. Too often we describe ourselves simply as a “niche sport” but it’s time to celebrate that we are much more than that.
We are a community builder.
A healthy lifestyle contributor.
An economic driver.
A leadership constructor.
A gathering place.
A national institution.
But if we do not tell that story and we do not talk about ourselves that way, we should not be surprised when others underestimate our value.
Building Curling’s self-esteem
This leads to what I believe is the central truth of this story that is three chapters in. The challenge facing curling is not that it lacks value. The challenge is that we have internally undervalued what we are to Canada. We have always struggled to measure our value or communicate it appropriately and it leads to unintended consequences or trains of thought.
That matters. Things that are not understood are rarely prioritized. Things that are not prioritized are rarely invested in. And things that are not invested in eventually become difficult to sustain.
This is not simply about funding or fees or ticket prices. It is about perception.
It is how we see ourselves. It is how governmental funders see us. It is how municipalities and communities see us. It is how current and future participants see us.
If we continue to describe curling only through number of clubs, or number of registered members, and we don’t talk about curling as a nation builder, we tell only a fraction of the story. The real story is much bigger and one we should be immensely proud of.
I don’t say all this to stoke fear; this shouldn’t discourage us. Once we understand the truth, though, we gain something powerful.
Choice.
We can continue responding to change or we can begin shaping the future intentionally, together, and with purpose. That is the difference between reacting/surviving and leading.
Curling is at a crossroads. What path will you take?
Every generation eventually reaches a point when it must decide whether it will protect the comfort of familiar thinking or embrace the responsibility of new ideas.
I believe Canadian curling is there.
Not because the past was lacking passion or expertise; I believe there was an abundance of that at all times in our history. And it’s not because the past got it wrong.
It’s because the future deserves our best ideas today.
The chapters that follow will explore four critical shifts that I believe will define the next generation of Canadian curling.
None of them asks us to abandon who we are or the soul of curling. Each asks us to become an even better version of ourselves.
The purpose of this series has never been to criticize the sport we inherited. It is to honour it by ensuring that, decades from now, another generation can look back and say that when the world changed, we had the wisdom to see it, and the courage to do it differently — with confidence, conviction and pride in what we were doing.
If the curling club system, or curling organizations, or Curling Canada, look different in 20 years, but we have a sustainable thriving system, then we all won. It will prove we had courage and that we left a legacy. And we will have shown the next generations that they have the agency to change what we have done today to better service the future they see. If they know it’s for the best, they will have the agency to make those changes, as that is what true leadership, what true legacy and more importantly true stewardship is all about.
Reflection
Before continuing, consider these questions:
- Have we mistaken resilience for sustainability?
- If curling disappeared from your community tomorrow, what would be lost beyond the game itself?
- Are we measuring what truly matters, or only what has always been easy to measure?
- What conversations have we postponed simply because we’ve always found another way to get through another season?
I believe our most uncomfortable truth is that we have undervalued what our sport provides to Canada
Chapter 4 will start to ask the critical questions that can turn that uncomfortable truth into a strength.
The future of Canadian curling podcast - Episode 3
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