The Darwin Bender rink showed spectators at the SaskPower Scotties Provincial Tournament of Hearts what wheelchair curling is all about last week.
The Saskatchewan Wheelchair Curling team was invited to give a demonstration during the provincial ladies' curling competition, hosted by the Humboldt Curling Club, January 25-29.
"I was a little bit nervous, especially for the first couple of shots," the team's skip, Darwin Bender, told the Journal after the game. "You never know what the ice is like for one thing, and then there are lots of people around, and there should be, because it's the Scotties Tournament of Hearts."
Bender and his three teammates played against a team made up of two women and two men who agreed to give wheelchair curling a try. They were Candace Chisholm and Natalie Bloomfield of the Chisholm Rink, Kirk Muyres, originally from St. Gregor and who played in the Canadian Junior Curling championship in 2011, and the Saskatchewan Curling Association president, Mike McClelland.
Curling from a wheelchair turned out to be somewhat of a surprise for the able-bodied players, as Kirk Muyres testified.
"It's all about your upper body and feeling," Muyres said. "I threw a guard, and I threw it 20 feet down the ice, and it was just absolutely totally different from what I'm used to.
"Our goal was to get a point, and we got four," continued Muyres. "So that made it interesting. It was luck, beginner's luck. It wouldn't happen again if we played."
"They gave us a lot of tips," Chisholm added. "So we were able to adjust the equipment to the way we needed it, the poles to the right length, and the arms on the wheelchairs to the right height."
But there is one big difference between the curling those four regularly play and the curling the wheelchair team plays, and that is the total absence of sweepers.
"When you throw a rock, you need to be so much more precise," explained Muyres. "You don't have that little portion of error that you can take out with sweeping. It means you've got to be right on, if you're not you've got no chance. It's way harder, about 30 or 40 per cent harder."
That, and the fact that each time a wheelchair player throws a rock, he needs to have somebody behind him holding the wheelchair in place so that it doesn't move.
In all, both teams seemed to enjoy the camaraderie of playing a sport that they all love in a way that was accessible to everyone.
"It was fun," Bender agreed. "It's always interesting when you take some able-bodied people and you put them in a chair, then have a game of curling."
The skip said the rink doesn't get to practise together very frequently because they don't live in the same city, so they are glad of any opportunity, such as the one during the Scotties tournament, to get some time together on the ice.
"There's a little bit of pressure which is good for us," said Bender. "We need that, because we're going to the Nationals to represent Saskatchewan soon."
The National Wheelchair Curling competition will be held in Thunder Bay from March 16-25.
