Persistence Pays Off

Week 154 – February 25, 2023 – You just never know

Once again, life lessons acquired from curling. I am so grateful for this game and the people who I play the game with. I’ve been so lucky and fortunate to have awesome teams to play with, here in Prince George, and other teams in past. I learn so much and human connection with my teammates as we play together is AWESOME. 🙂

I love our scoreboard. It describes my curling team so well. We are in the playoffs and this is the scoreboard of our first game. After league play, we placed 5th place out of 15 teams. I can’t believe that. I feel that we are just getting started this season. We have one bye in our league and we play on Fridays which means bonspiels too.

Anyway, this is our second year playing together and we are a random team. I call it serendipity. We just seem to gel. I play third. The skip and second are a couple. And, the lead is returning to the game after her husband passed away. We were all looking for a team and we became that team last year. It did not take long, but we have fun.

I think we placed third last year (I can’t remember), but the league was played different last year because we were still tapering from COVID-9 protocols, we had an A-event and B-event, and there were no bonspiels. This year, we played a round robin with all of the teams and now we are in the playoffs. After 2 ends, we’re down by 5.

You’d think we would give up. The skip and I missed our shots these two end, but as a team we just continued to play one shot at a time. Every time we start with the lead’s rocks it always felt like a restart. We took one point in the third end and stole one point four times. The game should have ended in the 7th but someone had to win.

We played the 8th end and during that end we were so happy to have tied the game. One shot at a time, we had the game set up with two of our rocks counting behind many guards. We were sitting very good with our last rock played (even though our skip hogged the rock, which was suppose to be a long guard). In the end, we stole 2.

Wow. We won the game. We stole 5 ends in a row. Unheard of and we did it. One shot at a time and the outcome worked in our favour. They were a super nice team to play with, but it was almost like we looked up and realized we won the game. I like this about our team. We never get too excited or too down on ourselves or the game.

We celebrated after the game with a round of drinks (even though our team hogged 4 rocks… aka. 4 rounds of drinks). We even had the chance to watch a bit of curling on TV. We just seem to have a hidden quality of just getting along and trying our best. In the end, persistence pays off. One rock at a time. For me, it’s one paper at a time.

I love this metaphor of our team, but also of life and work. None of us played a perfect game, but all of us were trying to do our best each shot. We encouraged each other throughout the game and we never get down on each other. I believe this to be true, if you had 4 incredible players who don’t get along, then that team will lose.

I also believe that when you are focused on the win, you will also lose. Mistakes will happen. Your job is to learn from them and do better next time. That’s all you have control of. Don’t dwell on the mistakes and don’t blame others. Own what you can control, find your people, and focus on one step at a time. In the end, you will win.