Call it Curl Runnings
Talk about hashtags!
This one just means more. Like the other posts I used this site: http://highschoolnicknames.homestead.com/
- Auburn/LSU/Missouri Tigers: 881 Unsurprisingly for a mascot that over a fifth of SEC schools use, the Tigers are used by a great many high schools. When including variations the number reaches 930, with the most interesting of those being the "Flyin' Tigers" and "Hustlin Tigers"
- Regarding Auburn, there are also 16 schools nicknamed the "War Eagles", all of which are in the south but none of which are in Alabama.
- Georgia/Mississippi State Bulldogs: 806 A very popular mascot name, but one which doesn't appear in any other P5 conference. Including variations, the number rounds up to 849. Interestingly, two schools use in NJ and NM use the spelling "Bulldawgs".
- Kentucky Wildcats: 669 Nice. What team? Wildcats! This number goes up to 697 when including Wildcat variations, including a cool school in Watsonville, CA that uses "Wildcatz"
- Ole Miss Rebels: 186 Which becomes 196 when adding variations, including the "Cockney Rebels" of the British School of Washington, DC.
- Florida Gators: 74 Despite being native to the southeastern US, a decent number of northeastern and western schools use the Gator as their mascot. A small number of schools use the variations "Lady", "Fighting", "Golden", and "Wild" to round out the overall number to 79.
- Texas A&M Aggies: 17 Unsurprisingly, most of these schools are located in the south or in traditionally rural areas. A notable exception is Saint Agnes in Saint Paul, MN, but I can't fault them for wanting that alliteration.
- Vanderbilt Commodores: 11 These schools are scattered along the east coast and midwest, with none of them being in TN. Including "Lady Commodores" this number is bumped up to 13. I've always loved this nickname and wish more schools would use it.
- Alabama Crimson Tide: 9 Despite its great fame at the college level, the Crimson Tide mascot is nary to be found in high school, let alone in the south, with 8 of the schools that use it ironically being in the north. The lone southern school that uses this name is Minden HS in Louisiana. Honorable mentions go to the Crimson Wave in Petersburg, VA and the Crimson Pride at Roncalli Catholic in Omaha.
- Tennessee Volunteers: 6 All of these schools are in the south, but none are in Tennessee. Their players likely live up to the nickname much more so
I always seem to think of it once the cold starts to hit. Is registration closed for most leagues now?
According to Norwegian state broadcaster NRK.no the curling mix doubles team has been invited back to Pyeongchang to recieve their bronse medal. The ceremony will likely take place on saturday.
Source (in Norwegian): https://www.nrk.no/sport/tass_-russiske-curlingspillere-sier-fra-seg-ol-bronsen-1.13928625
CAS announcement: http://www.tas-cas.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Media_Release_ADD_2018__English__6.pdf
Team Shuster finished dead last in the 2010 Olympic curling round robin with a record of of 2-7
Team Shuster finished 2nd to last in Sochi 2014, again with a record of 2-7.
During both Olympics, Shuster was widely referred to online under the unflattering nickname "Fat Hat" and disparaged as being a choker.
But Shuster rose above it and made clutch shot after clutch shot in 2018, including an unbelievable 5 point 8th end in the gold medal match.
What a story of resilience and persistence.
I'm not sure how widespread this practice is, but as a curler I have found that the bonspiel draws for big bonspiels are not made from a player/team point of view - take for example our local men's bonspiel here in Ottawa, Canada: the draw format that is published by the organizers is an Excel spreadsheet that is divided into separate events, and to follow your path through the bonspiel and to chart out potential games involved jumping between multiple Excel sheets or webpages to figure out where you might play. i understand why it's done this way, it is a tough job to manage an event like this where over 100 teams are involved over 5 days of curling in multiple venues - but as a comp sci geek, I thought that something could be done about it.
Because of this draw data format, for the last 8 years now I've been running a tool for our local bonspiels that creates a 'tree' view from a team's perspective. You plug in your starting game number, and it maps all of the possible games from that start game, making it easy to see where your next games are going to be; if you win, you move up in the graph, if you lose you go down. This has proven to be a big hit with our local curlers, and I have made the tool available for a few different bonspiels/tournaments in the area.
My question - would something like this be useful for other bonspiels that are going on elsewhere? If this is something that a bonspiel you run could use (or a bonspiel that you play in), feel free to send me a private message and I can see if I can adapt your draw's schedule data to fit the web tool (or vice-versa). For our local bonspiels, each event takes me about 30 minutes to tweak the data for the tool to read it, and from there it is relatively easy to get a page published that simplifies the draw navigation.
A few caveats: I am doing this on a volunteer basis, I can't guarantee that your draw's schedule is in a suitable format for the web tool, but I am willing to give just about anything a shot - and if it's too late for this year, maybe next year would work out better.
