Columbus Blue Jackets hit the pebbled ice in St. Adolphe, Man.
With his team mired in a three-game losing skid, a National Hockey League coach opted to against spending an off day putting his players through end-to-end line rushes and instead chose to build team morale on the pebbled ice in rural Manitoba.
Lauren Evason got a front-row seat to the action at her home curling club in St. Adolphe on Saturday, serving as the coach for all of the Columbus Blue Jackets players and staff members in their team-building activity.
Evason, an 18-year-old competitive curler, is related to first-year Columbus bench boss Dean Evason, who has a history of taking players out for similar outings.
“He’s done this in the past with one of his teams so he knows it’s a great bonding experience for the players and he wanted to recreate that for this team,” Lauren Evason said Wednesday.
The struggle was real for most of the players early on, she said.
Only a couple of them had thrown a curling rock before stepping onto the ice in St. Adolphe, which is about 30 kilometres south of Winnipeg.
“The first comment as soon as I slid out [of the hack] was ‘Woah, I cannot get that low!'” Evason said.
Several players went off to the side to stretch.
She also thinks her first slide out of the hack made it appear easier than it was.
“It was quite fun to watch these professional athletes struggle at first,” Evason said.
Most of the players initially had trouble determining which hand they should use to throw rocks from one end of the ice to the other, she said.
Evason answered a lot of questions, among them how to stay balanced while sliding and delivering the rock. She said most of them failed at first.
“Curling is such a touch sport, and a lot of them are used to be able to muscle through everything and just use their strength, and they couldn’t do that,” she said.
“A lot of the rocks went flying through the house right away, so they had to learn to dial it back.”
The <a href=”https://twitter.com/BlueJacketsNHL?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>@BlueJacketsNHL</a> did some team-building work on the final off day of the road trip.<br><br>They spent part of the day testing their skills at curling.<a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/CBJ?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#CBJ</a> <a href=”https://t.co/wcSdSr90vh”>pic.twitter.com/wcSdSr90vh</a>
—@FanDuelSN_CBUS
By the end of their experience, most of the players and staff were “super into it” and had gotten the hang of it.
They quickly understood there are no penalties in curling like there are in hockey, Evason said with a laugh.
She thoroughly enjoyed the chance to coach up a bunch of NHLers.
“I was super excited, just getting to be there with these athletes and just getting to show them my sport … and truly how difficult it can be,” Evason said.
The Blue Jackets’ break from their five-game road trip seems to have paid immediate dividends, as they knocked off the high-flying Winnipeg Jets 4-1 at Canada Life Centre on Sunday.
When in Winnipeg!<br><br>The ice looked a little different this afternoon during some team bonding at the curling rink 🤩 <a href=”https://t.co/1ROmxdpVL9″>pic.twitter.com/1ROmxdpVL9</a>
—@BlueJacketsNHL
Evason maintains she’s a Jets fan — except when Winnipeg faces off against Columbus.
“When they play the Jets it’s for sure ‘Go Blue Jackets,'” she said. “That’s just how it has to be in this family just because of my cousin.”
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