Two-time World champion, four-time European champion and Olympic bronze medallist Niklas Edin loves curling; because of that love the 30-year-old curler wants to make sure that others love the sport as well.
That’s why Edin - as well as second Kristian Lindstrom, lead Christoffer Sundgren and Team Rocque’s Laura Crocker – took some time Saturday afternoon to run a curling clinic for Yorkton and area junior curlers. “This is something that I like to do and my whole team likes to do it as well and we contribute as much as we can to developing the younger curlers,” said Edin during the curling clinic. “Fortunately or unfortunately we compete a lot so we don’t get that much time to do this kind of stuff, but we’ve had these kind of lectures four times now with the Grand Slam of Curling this year.”
Edin says that one of the main reasons he lends his time to assisting the youth in improving their curling skills is because he himself was without a mentor while growing up in Sweden. “When I grew up and started curling I really didn’t have a trainer or a coach, so I played the first five or six years of my career alone with my team and we tried to figure out stuff by ourselves while watching curling,” mentioned the two-time Olympian. “It would have helped if we had someone alongside with us, so it’s a lot of fun now that when we’re at this level we can go and help the juniors who are just starting out try to be better.”
As for what they taught the junior curlers, Edin said it wasn’t all that much. “This group, they were all pretty good already and had good coaching,” offered Edin, adding they simply corrected some things they noticed during the mini-games they had the juniors play. “We commented on and helped them with some technical stuff and tactical stuff and they were all really eager to learn.
“It was a lot of fun.”
And while Edin and Co. enjoyed what they were doing, the junior curlers they helped are also enjoyed the experience of learning from some of the world’s best curlers. “It was a great time. It was fun and we learned a lot,” offered junior curler Jon Nagy. “It’s really almost a once in a lifetime opportunity to learn from these kind of curlers and it’ll help us in the future when we’re playing.”
