The Cornwall Curling Club, like most curling facilities, tightly schedules its draws so that curlers don’t have to curl late at night, or right after work. Because of this, we allocate 15 minutes per end of curling, or 2 hours for a normal eight end draw. In order to ensure that this happens, we ring a buzzer 15 minutes before the end of the allotted time slot. At that time, we ask you to finish up the end you are on, and then take the rocks back to the home end if necessary. In other words, you have to be in the hack throwing your first rock in your last end by 15 minutes before the end of the allotted timeslot in order to get all the ends in. In order to keep things fair, we do this on the late evening draw as well as the early draw, to ensure that everyone is treated equally and you aren’t here too late at night. Whenever possible — i.e. there is a bartender on duty — the Board of Directors has voted to use the buzzer for all draws.
We realize that this can be annoying to some, particularly to those who are new to skipping, and/or need more time to decide shots, but fast play is an important skill to learn, particularly if you plan to participate in timed events like provincial championships. There are also techniques you can use to speed up play, including:
– start the game on time, or early if the ice and players are ready. If start time has passed and you are short a player, go anyway – they can join the team when they arrive.
– don’t waste time on easy-to-decide shots such as single hits. Save your strategy sessions for the tough shots with many rocks in play.
– the front end should set up the third and skip rocks in front of the hack so that the back end are ready to go after they decide the shot, and don’t have to take time getting their rocks in place
– put the rocks away as quickly as possible after an end. It’s not necessary for you to put all the rocks in order as the players can pick them out when they are about to deliver. As well, for the starting team each end, the lead should be in the hack with a rock getting ready to deliver while the second and third are putting away the final rocks.
– players should always be in the hack ready to deliver as soon as possible. A few seconds wasted by each player in each end can add up to minutes by the end of the match.