I made the mistake earlier this month of trying to be organised! I sat down with my diary and the RCCC Competitions Calendar to work out where I might be travelling to next season. No sooner than I had done that, the dates of the Scottish Junior Championships were changed (they are now Jan 12-16). The reason for the change was to avoid a clash with the World University Games.However, that change had a consequence, and the second leg of the Scottish Men's Championship had to be moved to January 21-23. As many of our top junior teams also play in the Scottish it makes sense not to have the Junior Championship dates clashing with the Scottish Championship.
No problem, you might think. But this weekend of January 22-23 is the Casino Rama Skins event in Ontario. David Murdoch and his team won this last year, see here, and he has been invited again with the team who were the World Champs in 2009. That's them above in action in Rama. There was originally no clash of dates, as January 22-23 had been a free weekend in the schedule. Now it wasn't. That gave the RCCC Events and Competitions Committee a problem. They have solved this by splitting the second leg of the Scottish Qualifiers in two, January 21-23 AND January 28-30. Presumably, if any of the Murdoch team have reached this stage of the Scottish, they will get to play their games on January 28-30.
Colin Hamilton explains, "The Qualifiers weekend two has been split into two weekends because we changed our original dates from the 14 -16 to the 21-23 Jan. David Murdoch had already confirmed to the TSN skins that he was available to play 22-23 Jan, a free weekend. So to be fair on David we have split the weekends."
I don't imagine that this has been much fun for the Royal Club's Events and Competitions Committee which comprises Pat Edington (Convener), Colin Hamilton (Manager of Events and Competitions), Bob Kelly (Board), Anne Malcolm (Board), Jim Jamieson (ASC Representative), Alan Durno (ASC Represetnative), William Arnot (ASC Representative), Anne Donald (ASC Representative), Sadie Anderson (LSC Representative), Leslie Ingram-Brown (Convener Umpires’ Committee), Moray Combe (Player’s Representative (Men) and Brenda Macintyre (Player's Representative (Ladies). Ex-officio are the President, Vice President and CEO. On one hand they would want to be supportive of our country's top players who have been invited to compete in one of Canada's most prestigious competitions. On the other hand they face criticism for apparently demeaning the importance of the Scottish Championship, in favour of allowing a team (which no longer exists as David and Ewan are skipping different teams this coming season) to take part in a televised extravaganza for their own financial benefit.
The problems all stem from trying to juggle the calendar. I've thrown away my first attempt on my own diary for next season with all its scorings out, and will await things to settle! One thing is sure though, it will be a busy time next season. The current version of the competitions calendar is here.
The pic is a Curling News photo by Anil Mungal.
