Curling Canada The home of curling in Canada.

Exactly one year from today, Feb. 7, 2014, the flame will be lit at the Fisht Olympic Stadium in Sochi, Russia, during the opening ceremonies of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

As I watch our Canadian women’s team in Denmark I can only imagine how difficult it would be to balance everything – family, work, curling and life in general.

I had the great opportunity this month to be able to help out as an assistant Coach with Team North America at the Continental Cup.

With only two weeks to go until the start of the M&M Meats Canadian Junior Curling Championships I have to send out congratulations to all of the provincial and territorial champions who will be making the trip to Calgary.

We have taken the opportunity to talk briefly about strategy in this blog and before we go any further we need to differentiate between the concept of strategy and tactics.

You can truly create a team when four players forego ego and focus on performance! I had the opportunity to take in the games at the Canada Cup this past weekend

I’m writing this as close to our weekend deadline as possible as I am excited to see if Team Mike McEwen can win their third event in a row.

This blog was created by Scott Arnold who worked hand in hand with the University of Western Ontario when they were working on sweeping technique and fabric identification on behalf of the CCA and Own The Podium.

Welcome to another addition of Hey Coach! I have had some great email conversations with interested readers on a number of topics and the number one topic that keeps coming up is strategy.

With the knowledge we now have about how best to create optimum friction on the ice surface, it is extremely important that you, as sweeper, utilize your body position to ensure maximum downward pressure.

As promised in an earlier blog, I am continuing down the path of enhancing individual practice.

We have had a lot of requests for some information from our sweeping study that we ran under the Top Secret Program from Own The Podium. Our sweeping study was completed by the University of Western Ontario and we had a number of top notch curling coaches involved -including Scott Arnold.

“We’re not talking about the game. We’re talking about practice.” A famous quote by one Allen Iverson, but it is truly applicable to our sport.

It’s an amazing experience as a curling fan to see a young athlete turn around and say “How was that Coach?” and the person answering is a current high performance curler in our country. That was our reality this past weekend at our La Releve Camp in Edmonton.

Future generations of Olympians and World Champions is what the Canadian Curling Association’s La Releve program is all about.   “La What” you say?  La Releve.