UMD faces Mother Nature, home opener, tourney elimination
Because of league rule technicalities, the UMD baseball team was faced with anticipating two things on Easter Weekend. One, the Bulldogs saw the chance to play their first games in the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference; two, they anticipated being eliminated from any chance to enter the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference post-season tournament.
Just another nonweekend in what has become the UMD baseball’s nonseason.
Coach Scott Hanna threw his arm out earlier this week, but not by throwing too much batting practice. It was from overdoing it with a snow-blower trying to clear the last snow and ice from UMD’s baseball field. The last snow, that is, unless forecasts for snow on Monday prove to be true.
The trouble started even before that, however, as UMD went south for its annual game-playing swing to get ready for the later Up North season. “We went down south and got rained out in Atlanta, then on the way back we got snowed out in Missouri,”. said Hanna.
“This isn’t the worst spring I’ve seen in my 23 years here, this is normal. We got spoiled because the last three years we had mild winters and we were able to get the field ready a lot earlier. This year is just back to normal. The problems we’ve had have not been the late spring in Duluth. We’re smart enough to not schedule any games at home until the second week in April. The problem has been on the road.”
UMD is only 2-8 for a record so far, and hasn’t played a game since March 14 because of rainouts on the road. But things went from merely frustrating to critical in the last week, because of a couple of Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference rules, which were put in place to try to assure that scheduled games get played if at all possible. One rule is that if a team doesn’t play at least 10 of its 16 league games, it cannot qualify for the league post-season tournament. The other is that if a team postpones games on Friday or Saturday, the games must be made up by the following Monday, or else the postponement turns into a cancellation — meaning it can’t be rescheduled.
UMD’s doubleheaders last weekend at Northern State and Minnesota-Morris were postponed, and then cancelled. Four games down, 12 to go. This weekend, Concordia of St. Paul was scheduled to come to UMD for a Friday doubleheader, and league favorite Winona State was slated to play two in Duluth on Saturday.
“If we lose these two doubleheaders,” said Hanna, “we’d only have eight league games left, and we need to play 10 to qualify for the tournament.”
Hanna said “if” UMD loses the two doubleheaders this weekend, but at midweek he knew there was no chance to play them, even if it did stop raining. “We spent all day [Tuesday] snowblowing, and we got the snow about 90 percent melted,” said Hanna. “But there’s still frost in the outfield. We’ve done everything we could, and our kids are hardened to it. Once we get rid of all the frost, it’ll take one full day of work to get the field ready to play on.”
Mike Lockern, the first-year commissioner of the Northern Sun Inrtercollegiate Conference, has tried to make some moves to help teams get around Mother Nature’s hurdles, and he has been in touch with Hanna.
“We’re trying to do what’s best for the student-athletes,” Lockern said. “This has just been one of those years. We’ve had to work to be creative. In softball, all 10 teams go to the conference tournament, because they have a different pitching structure. In baseball, it’s a problem. A couple of our teams have played four games, a couple others two games, and some haven’t played any.”
Minnesota-Crookston was scheduled to play at Wayne State, in Nebraska, last weekend, and Wayne State was scheduled to play at Southwest State on Saturday. But Southwest’s field in Marshall unplayable, so Lockern gave Southwest permission to go to Wayne State instead, and not only play Wayne but also play Crookston at Wayne. That was outside the rules of the league, and while Lockern showed some creativity in helping arrange it, it creates some other problems.
Hanna pointed out that some schools don’t have sufficient budgets to abandon a home game and make a hasty road trip with the expense of transportation, hotels and meals. “As coaches, we put in a lot of time and discussion before we came up with some of these rules,” said Hanna. “So you can open a can of worms if you suddenly allow some teams to change while others can’t.”
Once the field is ready, Hanna said the Bulldogs will be, too.
“Luckily, we’ve been able to work out in the fieldhouse,” he said. “And we’ve gone out and simulated infield and outfield drills on the turf of the football field. But after a month without any games, I realized I’d forgotten the signs; I had to go back and look them up. After a month, I was thinking of taping their names onto their shirts so I’d know who was who.”
Hanna’s sense of humor helps get through a seemingly impossible situation. “We’ve worked out hard on conditioning and cardio by running a lot, and we’ve really stepped that up,” said Hanna. “But whatever you do, you can’t simulate pitching a 7-inning game. We’ve got 14 pitchers who wanted to try out for spots on the team, and I realized that we won’t even get to let them all pitch in competition this year.”
Ironically, UMD may have been involved in a couple of situations that led to the current rules on minimum games and makeups.
“In 1991, we were two games short and we had a doubleheader at Southwest State,” said Hanna. “If we won both, we’d win our first league title in baseball. But they didn’t have the field ready, and they said they couldn’t. Their coach said he might be able to get the field ready, but they could only play one game. We argued about it, and the umpires wanted us to play. Obviously, if you could fix it enough to play one game, you could stay a little longer and play two, but they refused. Since one game wouldn’t do us any good, I got mad, so we left without playing any.
“Two years later, in 1993, we won our first title. We were supposed to play a doubleheader and we won the first game, which gave us the minimum 12 games we needed in those years, but a tornado came through during the second game and we couldn’t play it. So we won the title with an 8-4 record. So I guess you could say the rules cost us the championship one year, and helped us win it the other. I’m a believer in the rules, and if you want to change them, do it at the league meetings, right after the season. I figure if we can’t get in enough games to be in the tournament, we’ll be prepared to live with it.”
Lockern said it would be great if the league could somehow schedule a weekend at some place like the Metrodome to allow teams to make up a couple of doubleheaders, but that would be impossible on short notice. Of course, the way this spring has gone, there could be a scenario where NO team gets in the minimum number of games and the league tournament would have no entries.
Tiger’s tale sets records of golf achievement, and hyperbole
Tiger Woods has done it again. He won the Masters with a dramatic, long putt on the final hole at Augusta National last Sunday, to overcome a persistent challenge from David Duval, and a lesser but serious challenge by Phil Mickelson.
That gives Woods a unique string of winning four consecutive major PGA golf championships, and he undoubtedly will just keep on winning, majors and other events that he chooses to enter.
The best feature of Tiger’s latest conquest is that he didn’t blow away the entire field and romp to a record-shattering victory. He didn’t take over from his first tee shot on Day 1 and outdistance the field, reducing the rest of the world’s greatest golfers to competing for a distant second place.
No, this time, Tiger had to start off in the midst of the lead pack, wait until the early leaders fell back while he stalked the lead himself and moved steadily upward. Then he had to battle throughout the final round, and gave the national television producers some memorable moments. Those producers love to call for the camera shots that show those bigger-than-lifesize close-ups of athletes, pore-shots, we might call them. Usually they are ridiculously overdone, and become trite and meaningless in the process. But this time those close-ups captured the intensity and the competitiveness of Tiger Woods as he fought and won golf’s greatest prize.
The most impressive thing about his triumph was that Duval’s 274 was 14 under par, the best ever shot by a runner-up at the Masters, and thus easily good enough to win. But when Duval’s putt on 18 rolled just an inch wide, the end became inevitable. Shouldn’t have been, but with Tiger on your tail, it seems to be. A few minutes later, Woods, who was playing two groups back, got to the same point and rolled a 15-footer into the same 18th hole for a birdie, and a 16-under par scorecard that showed 70-66-68-68–272.
If Duval had made that final 6-foot putt, maybe Woods might have faced enough pressure to miss his 15-footer, and the two would have been tied. Or maybe Woods might have rolled an even more dramatic putt into the same hole for a spectacular 1-stroke victory.
None of that matters. The fact is, Duval had his chances, and made enough misses to require great fortitude to keep rallying back. Woods missed some shots too, but when the pressure was on, Duval just missed, and Woods won again.
The only downside to the whole magnificent performance by Woods — who is only 25, yet — comes from some of us in the sports media business. In groping for superlatives to describe Woods’ apparently indescribable conquest, some of the writers and broadcasters have gone flat off the deep end. Some actually called this the greatest sports accomplishment of all time, and named Woods the greatest athlete of all time.
Hold on, fellas. Let’s not get crazy, here.
We know that Woods could be called the greatest golfer ever. Even though he’s got most of his career ahead of him, he has done what seems impossible. In the old days, golfers of the quality of Ben Hogan were very good, maybe dominant. Along came Arnold Palmer, and then Jack Nicklaus, and we learned what domination was really about.
But even in those days, there were some regular names on the tour, and you had heard of just about all of them. It was a nice, tight clique. In more recent times, the PGA tour has been taken over by a whole new breed — dozens, maybe hundreds of new young lions have gone after pro golf’s riches. You could say that never before in the history of golf have there been so many top-notch challengers capable of winning any given golf tournament.
So it is into that incredibly wide-spread field of competition that Tiger Woods has stalked, and overwhelmed, all comers. Nobody else in the history of the game could have done it so totally, even in past eras when the competition was sparse.
But to those media types groping to compare this to the usual suspects of greatness — Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth — can’t we just back off a little? Tiger Woods hits a golf ball further, straighter and more accurately than anyone has ever imagined, but we can’t be sure if he could have set up a Stanley Cup-winning goal while a mugger bodychecked him, or hit in 50 straight games with fastballs whizzing under his chin, or hovered in the air from the top of the key while changing hands on a reverse layup to win the NBA championship.
So we can’t say if this makes him the greatest athlete in history, or this the greatest athletic achievement in history. It’s simply the greatest achievement in golf history. That’s enough for me.
Canada ends Team USA’s long road to win Gold Medal, 3-2
MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.—The red-clad players were strung out arm-in-arm in a ragged line on the Mariucci Arena ice Sunday afternoon, singing “O, Canada” at the tops of their lungs. Their singing got way ahead of the recorded music being played in tribute to them, but that was appropriate too, because Team Canada finished ahead of everybody else on the ice, including Team USA.
Canada stung Team USA 3-2 in an intensely played final game to win the gold medal of the 2001 Women’s World Hockey Championships. Again. A solid portion of the 5,632 fans stood and waved the red and white Maple Leaf flag in the stands, as the U.S. players slumped in something approaching disbelief that their long road of preparation resulted in the silver, not the gold.
There have been seven World Championships now, and Canada has beaten the U.S. in every one of them. Team USA won the only Winter Olympics women’s tournament, in 1998 at Nagano, Japan, by beating Canada. But when it comes to World Championships, it doesn’t seem to matter what Team USA does in preparation.
This past season, for example, Team USA trained by cloistering its players together for 24 hours a day for the last seven months, while Canada was the exact opposite, summoning its players two weeks ago from club teams, U.S. college teams, and wherever their scattered lives had taken them.
Both teams blew through their preliminary rounds, and while the U.S. beat Russia 6-1, Canada whipped Finland 8-0 in semifinal play on Saturday. That set the stage for the annual showdown, and the game lived up to its billing.
“It was one of our usual classic battles,” said U.S. coach Ben Smith, who has heard some criticism that the costly preparation that has sent his team to Lake Placid for the year was overdoing it, considering the objective was to win one single game — from Canada. “I don’t think we left anything on the ice.
“I take my hat off to our opponent; they played a smart, intense game. When we got down to the last period, it felt like the clock was our enemy, but maybe it felt like an ally to the red team. The other game we lost was in November to this same team.”
It was an interesting study in coaching philosophies — Smith referred to Canada as an opponent, as the other team, as the red team, but never to Canada as, simply, Canada.
Daniele Sauvageau, Canada’s coach, was the opposite. “When the USA and Canada play, I think the refs may let more go because we both play at the same high level,” she said. “I think the thing that both Canada and the USA have to do is find a way to bring the rest of the world’s teams to that level. For us, it was the nicest way to finish the season.
“We got together two weeks ago as a team, and we began to build on our intensity. There is not a right way and a wrong way to prepare. The USA is our toughest opponent, and we get the most out of playing them.”
Canada goaltender Kim St-Pierre, however, pointed out that, “Just because we only got together a week before the World Championships doesn’t mean we weren’t ready.”
Indeed. The U.S. outshot Canada 35-18, but Canada played it smart all the way, after taking the opening 1-0 lead. Dana Antal scored by deflecting Vicky Sunohara’s blue line shot in for a power-play goal at 8:09 of the first period. Team USA tied it when Carisa Zaban put on a burst of speed to dart inside a defenseman on a 1-on-2 rush, racing to the crease to deke to her backhand and score at 17:36.
Then it was college time. Team USA included several players who had been taken away from their college teams to live at Lake Placid, while Canada’s stars were attending college, such as Jenny Botterill and Tammy Shewchuk, who were playing at Harvard, which lost to UMD in the semifinals of the NCAA women’s tournament on the same Mariucci Arena ice two weeks ago. Both headed for Team Canada, and now have a different prize.
Shewchuk was at the left edge of the crease to slam in Kelly Bechard’s goal-mouth pass at 9:45 of the second period, breaking a 1-1 deadlock. Canada, protecting St-Pierre, was clinging to that 2-1 edge until 3:15 remained.
At that point, Botterill — who was named the most valuable player of the entire tournament — won a right-corner faceoff and pulled the puck straight back to the right point, then drifted, all alone, to the goal, where she deflected Therese Brisson’s shot past goaltender Sarah Tueting for a 3-1 Canada lead.
Canada’s Correne Bredin was penalized with 1:26 left, and Smith pulled Tueting for a 6-on-4 advantage. M.J. Mleczko scored for the U.S. with 1:19 left on the power play, drilling her shot from the slot after a pass attempt from Krissy Wendell had glanced off a defenseman’s skate directly onto her stick.
But with 59 seconds left, Karyn Bye was called for tripping, and Canada simply kept chipping the puck clear until it ended.
“It’s an empty feeling to not come away with what we wanted,” said U.S. center Cammi Granato.
For now, the U.S. players get to go home. But coach Ben Smith already has thoughts occupying his mind. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we start building for the evaluation process for the Olympics. In fact, we have open tryouts, starting next weekend.”
RUSSIA STUNS FINLAND
2-1 FOR FIRST BRONZE
Never has any Russian hockey team displayed so much outright glee at winning a bronze medal. The Russian women’s hockey team — which had never before played in a medal-round game in a women’s World Championships — defeated Finland 2-1 Sunday afternoon to win the bronze medal. When it was over, and goaltender Irina Gachennikova and her gathering cluster of defenders had survived a furious Finnish attack, the red-clad Russians poured off their bench to celebrate.
“Before this tournament, I didn’t believe the bronze was possible,” said Ekaterina Pashkevich, whose power-play goal at 11:24 of the second period broke a 1-1 tie and, ultimately, delivered the margin for that bronze medal. “Some of the younger players said we could win the bronze, and I thought, OK, let’s just see if we can play well enough to maybe upset Sweden.”
The Russians did upset Sweden, 3-0, to earn the medal round, and gave both Canada and the U.S. their toughest games as they progressed to the gold medal game. Then, to top it off, Russia beat Finland, the team that had been the clear third-best team in women’s world competition for two decades.
“It is not a shock, but, of course, it is a really big disappointment,” said goaltender Tuula Puputti, who anchored UMD’s NCAA championship performance on the same Mariucci Arena ice two weekends ago. “The Russian team played really well in front of both nets — offensively and defensively. We got lots better from the beginning of the tournament, though, and we have so many new players, that I can only hope our hockey federation allows this coach [Jouko Lukkarila] and these players time to show we can improve enough to play in the Olympics next year.”
Russia, which was the dominant amateur team in men’s hockey through the last four decades, always had a fierce rivalry with Finland, but there never had been the same intensity in women’s hockey, with Finland dominating. Russia took a 1-0 lead when Svetlana Trefilova managed to chip the puck past Puputti on a power play. “As usual, when the puck came to me, it happened very quick,” she said. “I didn’t think about anything, I just shot it.”
Finland came back to tie it at 8:59 of the second, when Karolina Rantamaki scored on a power play. Less than three minutes later, Pashkevich — who has been living in Boston for the last seven years, but will give up her women’s coaching job at MIT to prepare with the Russians for the 2002 Winter Olympics — scored another power-play goal, and it stood as the winner.
Lukkarila, a clever, creative coach, pulled Puputti with four minutes left, and Finland responded by putting on the best pressure it had generated all game. Gachennikova, however, came up with whatever shots found their way through the maze of bodies the Russians threw in the way.
“It was pure emotion, adrenaline,” said Pashkevich. “Every shift, we gave 100 percent, and played like we never did before.”
‘Mom’ chips in goal and assist as Team USA routs Germany 13-0
SAINT CLOUD, MINN.—Not bad, “mom.”
Jenny Schmidgall, the former and future UMD star who took the year off to have a baby in January, officially made her return to hockey competition Monday night, and her Team USA teammates made it an easy transition by blowing out Germany 13-0 in the first game of round-robin competition.
Shmiggy took her regular turns, skated hard, and, as usual, was smart and efficient throughout the game on the vast Olympic-size ice sheet at St. Cloud State’s National Hockey Center. But she achieved another plateau in her comeback at 1:04 of the third period, when, with the game already beyond doubt, she stationed herself in traffic in front of the German goal and deflected in a shot from center-point by Sue Merz.
That goal made it 12-0, and Schmidgall also assisted on Chris Bailey’s second goal of the game, with 22 seconds left.
“I feel pretty good,” said Schmidgall. “I saw the shot coming all the way. It’s something we work on in practice, going to the net for tip-ins and rebounds.”
Team USA scored five goals in the first period, with Katie King scoring two of them, and six more in the second. But Nadine Pfreundschuh, who relieved Stephanie Wartosch-Kurten in the German goal when it was 8-0, came up with some spectacular saves as the U.S. never let up on the attack, but had to work harder for the Schmidgall and Bailey goals in the third.
Annamarie Holmes of Apple Valley got the first U.S. goal, then King scored her two, sandwiching one by Bailey. Natalie Darwitz, the teenage sensation from Eagan, who is taking junior class courses by internet from Team USA’s base in Lake Placid, N.Y., scored with a Julie Chu pass to finish the first period. In the second period, Krissy Wendell, Carisa Zaban, Karyn Bye, Shelley Looner, Cammi Granato and Tricia Dunn scored, Team USA outshot Germany 55-11.
The U.S. game might have gone according to form, but the rest of the World Tournament got off to a shocking start. In the first Pool B game at St. Cloud, Finland never trailed, but continuously gave up goals to China, blowing a pair of two-goal leads, and didn’t capture a 7-6 victory until Marja-Helena Palvila scored her second goal of the game on a rebound from the slot with 3:04 remaining.
While Finland, with four players from UMD’s roster, could take a sigh of relief at their close call, Sweden — the clear favorite to be in the bronze medal game — was stunned 3-0 by Russia in the first game of Pool A play in Rochester. Canada, as expected, kept pace with Team USA by blitzing Kazakhstan 11-0 in the other Pool A game.
At St. Cloud, the lopsided score made it a low-pressure night, with Sarah Teuting needing only 11 saves for the shutout, and coach Ben Smith extolled the values of balanced scoring, and getting Schmidgall back in the lineup. He cut two players last week to add Schmidgall and to bring back Wendell, who had been out with mononucleosis.
“We wanted to have the 20 best players at this particular time,” said Smith. “And it so happened we had two real high-skilled players who integrate with what we do. We’ve put Jenny at center with Cammi Granato on the right, and Bailey gives them some thump on the left. We think that’s going to be a dangerous line.
“Jenny’s life has changed, and she has a big commitment now, but this team is a big part of her life, too. You can see that her head and her hands are working like usual, and her whole game will get better and better. It’s like they say, ‘you can see times when her legs can’t cash the checks that her head is writing out.’ But as I told coach [Julie] Sasner, it would be shame on us if she doesn’t look a little rusty, after what we’ve been doing all year.
Schmidgall acknowledged that everybody on Team USA calls her “mom,” and her daughter, Madison, was upstairs in the stands, somewhere, with her parents and her fiancee, Rob Potter. She also acknowledged that she is not yet near 100 percent, which she calls “110 percent” as a lifelong over-achiever.
“It’s the level of competition, the bumps and the grinding, with players in your face, that takes some getting used to,” Schmidgall said. “But I didn’t feel tired out there tonight. I started working out six weeks ago, and Rob is tough on me when we work out. I felt a little nervous when I first came to practice last week, but I’m not tired. Obviously, I’m not at my best, and I probably won’t be for a while. It’s frustrating when you know where you were last year, and that you’re not there now.”
But she wouldn’t bet against being there by the weekend, when Team USA is counting on playing Canada for the gold medal.
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Tuula Puputti anchored UMD’s NCAA women’s hockey championship game eight days earlier, and she stayed sharp through a week of intense practice with Finland’s national team. But she still insisted on taking the blame for letting China get as close as it did before falling 7-6 to the favored Finns.
“With real good players on both sides, you have to expect that when they get a chance, they’ll make a play and get a good, quality shot,” said Puputti. “But I still should have been ready for those.”
Finland outshot China 37-26, but with UMD teammate Satu Kiipeli scoring her first goal of the season — shorthanded, at 4:29 of the first period — and Marja Helena Palvila making it 2-0 midway through the opening session, things seemed to be rolling. But the youthful and rebuilding Finnish team developed a habit of stepping up at costly times, and the Chinese team capitalized for two 2-on-1 goals, with Rui Sun scoring at 15:50 and setting up Hongmei Liu at 17:39 for a 2-2 tie.
Katja Riipi reclaimed the lead for Finland at 17:53, but Liu scored again at 19:01. It took Vilja Lipsonen’s goal, assisted by UMD’s Hanne Sikio, at 19:43 to put Finland back up 4-3 after a wild opening period. Sanna Peura, yet another UMD skater, made it 5-3 with a goal from the crease at 3:18 of the second, but China continued to capitalize on its chances, and after Suvi Seppala’s shorthanded goal boosted Finland to a 6-4 lead in the third, China scored twice in 29 seconds to gain a 6-6 deadlock.
Palvila’s second goal, with 3:04 left, gave Finland the narrow escape.
3 Minnesota, 2 Wisconsin teams advance in U.S. Curling Qualifier
Minnesota and Wisconsin teams took all five qualifying slots from the U.S. National Qualifier event at the Duluth Curling Club, with the Tim Somerville and Doug Pottinger rinks capturing the final two positions Sunday for the upcoming 2002 Olympic trials.
The five rinks earning a chance to advance to Ogden, Utah, for the Dec. 11-16 Olympic trials are: 1. Paul Pustovar of Wisconsin; 2. Scott Baird, Minnesota; 3. Andy Borland, Minnesota; 4. Pottinger, Wisconsin; and 5. Somerville, Minnesota. They will join the Craig Brown team from Madison, Wis., which had secured one spot by winning the 2000 U.S. National Championship.
That means three Minnesota and three Wisconsin teams will battle in Ogden for the right to represent the U.S. at Salt Lake City in 2002.
The top-seeded Pustovar rink defeated the Pottinger rink, also of Wisconsin, in the showdown between the two final undefeated A Flight teams Saturday morning, earning the automatic No. 1 berth. The Pustovar team, whose skip, Paul Pustovar, is originally from Eveleth, had beaten Duluth’s Somerville team in Friday night’s semifinals in A.
The second and third qualifiers came out of the B Flight, where the last four teams with one defeat met Saturday night. Bemidji’s Scott Baird rink, which had been seeded No. 2, beat fifth-seeded Somerville 10-6, while the Andy Borland team from Hibbing defeated the Mike Farbelow team Saturday morning and then defeated the Pottinger rink 7-5 Saturday night, for the second and third qualifying slots. The Borland team was seeded sixth.
The triple-knockout competition among 32 teams started Wednesday, and ended Sunday, when Pottinger came back to beat the third-seeded Pete Fenson rink of Minnesota 7-3 to secure one of the two remaining positions. Somerville came back to gain a 6-6 deadlock in the 10th end against the 13th seeded Mike Fraboni rink from Wisconsin, and won 8-6 by counting two in the 11th — meaning the 1998 U.S. Olympic representative barely squeezed into the final spot.
Phil Drobnick of Eveleth, currently a student at Bemidji State University, gave an Iron Range flavor to the Baird rink. In fact, Drobnick is the grandson of Ron Drobnick, the goaltending hero of the first Eveleth hockey dynasty back in the 1940s, on one side, while former Eveleth High School hockey coach Bill McKenzie is his grandfather on his mother’s side. Phil played hockey until seventh grade, then switched to the “other” ice sport.
“This puts us into the trials, which was one of our two objectives for the year,” said Phil Drobnick. “I played with Cody Stevens and Randy Baird on a team that won the junior national championship in Bemidji last year. Randy’s dad is Scott Baird, and Cody’s brother is Matt Stevens, which is how I got on this team. Matt and Cody and I are on the team, and Randy Baird is the skip, while Scott Baird is our fifth member.
“After we won the junior nationals, we set two goals, winning the nationals and getting to the Olympic qualifier. We were seeded second at the nationals, and we went 10-1 through round-robin play, but we lost to the fourth-seeded team. So this at least gives us a chance to redeem ourselves.”
The Baird rink reached its objective by overcoming Somerville in the game that lasted longest on Saturday night. The rest of the matches were done before Baird’s team protected an 8-6 lead in the 10th end the most effective way — by scoring two more itself.
“We had a tough match with Somerville. Tim Somerville is a real good shooter, but we got up early, and had a chance to put it away, but one of our rocks picked up a hair from a broom and picked off a guard, and let them fight back into the game. They tied it in the eighth end, but we got two back in the ninth and played a great 10th. Scott Baird had a wonderful shot, a ‘double peel,’ and rolled it into the house.”
Drobnick was referring to his team’s act of holding off Somerville’s attempt to tie in the 10th end. Somerville’s team slid two rocks into front guard positions, with the intention then of curling another rock into the scoring area. But Baird, the skip and final shooter, slid a “double-peel” to knock out both guard rocks, and his rock then made it into the scoring area. Somerville’s final rock was unable to get inside Baird’s, and thus saw the deficit swell from 2 to 4 in the 10-6 match.
Curling is an intensely tactical sport, more precise than the 42-pound rocks would imply, and the jargon is like another language to the uninitiated.
The top-seeded Pustovar team, comprised of Paul Pustovar, Mike Peplinski, Dave Violette, Cory Ward and Doug Anderson, opened with a 7-4 victory over Michigan’s Jeff Michael team, then beat Minnesota’s Ross Litman rink 8-6 with two scores in the 10th and final end. Next came the Craig Polski rink from Duluth, and Pustovar won 9-8 in an extra end. Pustovar then edged Somerville in a 4-2 classic, before blitzing Pottinger 9-3 to earn the top qualifying spot.
Andy Borland’s rink consists of Borland, Dave Johnson and Jeff Shapiro of Hibbing and Kevin Stevens of Duluth. Borloand beat the Tony Steiert rink of Pennsylvania 10-9 in an extra end to start with, then lost 10-9 to Mike Farbelow’s Minnesota team, despite scoring three in the 10th. That dropped Borland to the B Flight, where the team rebounded to win 7-5 over Alaska’s Paul Stankavich rink, then beat the Pete Carmichael rink from Illinois 8-5, and knocked off Hibbing rival Polski 9-8 in an extra end. Borland had to beat Farbelow 6-5 to get the shot at Pottinger, and Borland prevailed 9-3.
The Polski rink was the picture of playing well and losing close. The Hibbing rink beat Chris Moore of Michigan 10-3, and Ragner Kamp of Maine 9-1 before running into three consecutive excruciating finishes. Polski lost 9-8 in the 11-end game to Pustovar, which dropped them to the B Flight, where they lost to Borland, also 9-8 in 11 ends. On Saturday morning Polski lost a third straight 9-8, 11-end game, this time to the No. 4 seeded Andy Roza rink from Nebraska.
About the Author
John Gilbert is a lifetime Minnesotan and career journalist, specializing in cars and sports during and since spending 30 years at the Minneapolis Tribune, now the Star Tribune. More recently, he has continued translating the high-tech world of autos and sharing his passionate insights as a freelance writer/photographer/broadcaster. A member of the prestigious North American Car and Truck of the Year jury since 1993. John can be heard Monday-Friday from 9-11am on 610 KDAL(www.kdal610.com) on the "John Gilbert Show," and writes a column in the Duluth Reader.
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