January 2016 archive
Jan 04
Keene’s Chloe York Heading To USA Curling Junior National Championships
We are delighted to announce that Keene’s Chloe York will be playing in the USA Curling Junior National Championships in Willmar, Minnesota from January 16-23, 2015 as one of the top 10 Junior women’s curling teams in the USA! Last week at the regional “playdowns” (tournament), her team won one of two spots from the eastern USA for the “Nationals”. The team will now travel to Minnesota starting January 15 to compete against nine other teams.
Chloe, on the right in the photo, is 13 years old and an 8th grade student at the Monadnock Waldorf School in Keene. Chloe started curling in 2011 at the Petersham Curling Club about 45 minutes south of Keene in Petersham, MA. Her team is led by skip (captain) Rebecca Rodgers, 15, also from Petersham Curling Club, and includes Anna Cenzalli, 14, from Cape Cod Curling Club, and Elizabeth Janiak, 14, from the Nashua (NH) Country Club. Chloe plays the “lead” position that throws the first rocks in a game. All of the girls have been curling for 5-8 years and have been playing in competitive bonspiels (tournaments) throughout the region.
Given that this “Team Rodgers” is a new team without any corporate sponsorship, they are actively asking for donations to help fund the costs of flying 8 people (the 4 girls and their parent chaperones) out to Minnesota and housing/feeding them for the 9 days of the event. If you would like to help support this amazing opportunity for these girls, please visit:
https://www.gofundme.com/teamrodgerscurling
If you are with a corporation or other entity that might be willing to help financially, please contact team coach Dan York at 603-439-0024 or dyork@lodestar2.com .
If you would like to follow the activities of the team over the next few weeks as they prepare for and then compete at the 2016 Junior National Championships, please follow the team on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/TeamRodgersCurling where they will be posting updates.
Thank you to everyone in the area who has already helped out the team! The girls are so excited for this incredible opportunity to play at a national level!
P.S. Wouldn’t it be great if we could offer the sport of curling in Keene? Please let us know you are interested!
Jan 04
Keene’s Chloe York Heading To USA Curling Junior National Championships
We are delighted to announce that Keene’s Chloe York will be playing in the USA Curling Junior National Championships in Willmar, Minnesota from January 16-23, 2015 as one of the top 10 Junior women’s curling teams in the USA! Last week at the regional “playdowns” (tournament), her team won one of two spots from the eastern USA for the “Nationals”. The team will now travel to Minnesota starting January 15 to compete against nine other teams.
Chloe, on the right in the photo, is 13 years old and an 8th grade student at the Monadnock Waldorf School in Keene. Chloe started curling in 2011 at the Petersham Curling Club about 45 minutes south of Keene in Petersham, MA. Her team is led by skip (captain) Rebecca Rodgers, 15, also from Petersham Curling Club, and includes Anna Cenzalli, 14, from Cape Cod Curling Club, and Elizabeth Janiak, 14, from the Nashua (NH) Country Club. Chloe plays the “lead” position that throws the first rocks in a game. All of the girls have been curling for 5-8 years and have been playing in competitive bonspiels (tournaments) throughout the region.
Given that this “Team Rodgers” is a new team without any corporate sponsorship, they are actively asking for donations to help fund the costs of flying 8 people (the 4 girls and their parent chaperones) out to Minnesota and housing/feeding them for the 9 days of the event. If you would like to help support this amazing opportunity for these girls, please visit:
https://www.gofundme.com/teamrodgerscurling
If you are with a corporation or other entity that might be willing to help financially, please contact team coach Dan York at 603-439-0024 or dyork@lodestar2.com .
If you would like to follow the activities of the team over the next few weeks as they prepare for and then compete at the 2016 Junior National Championships, please follow the team on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/TeamRodgersCurling where they will be posting updates.
Thank you to everyone in the area who has already helped out the team! The girls are so excited for this incredible opportunity to play at a national level!
P.S. Wouldn’t it be great if we could offer the sport of curling in Keene? Please let us know you are interested!
Jan 04
TDYR 280 – Heading To 2016 USA Curling Junior National Championships
Our daughter's curling team is heading to the Junior National Championships and in this episode I talk about all the excitement of heading to Minnesota in 11 days! You can follow along on Facebook at:
https://www.facebook.com/TeamRodgersCurling
I also mention the GoFundMe page we set up to help fund the journey:
https://www.gofundme.com/teamrodgerscurling
It's an amazing opportunity and we're SO excited!
Jan 04
Heading To The 2016 USA Curling Junior National Champshionships!
Yea! Our daughter's curling team is heading to the 2016 USA Curling Junior National Championships this month! Her team will be one of the top 10 junior women's teams competing for the championship in Willmar, Minnesota, from January 16-23. She and her team are SO excited!
Over the holiday break her curling team competed at the regional "GNCC Playdowns" where three womens teams were competing for two slots at the Nationals. Starting on Sunday, December 27, 2015, it was a very tense set of days, but on Tuesday morning they were able to win their final game and get the second spot.
They will now be "Massachusetts 2" in the list of qualified teams for the Junior Nationals.
The "Massachusetts" name comes from the state where the skip (captain) of the team is located. In our case the skip, Rebecca Rodgers, curls out of the Petersham Curling Club in Petersham, MA, as does our daughter Chloe. The other two girls curl out of the Cape Cod (MA) Curling Club and the Nashua (NH) Country Club.
WE LEAVE ON FRIDAY, JANUARY 15! So this is all happening in a whirlwind of activity in a short time.
If you'd like to follow along with their activities, we've set up a Facebook page at:
https://www.facebook.com/TeamRodgersCurling
It is a public page, so you do NOT need a Facebook account to view the page.
At the Junior Nationals, they will be up against some of the best Juniors teams in the USA, and with the Junior age range being ages 12-21 ... and our girls being 13-15... there are definitely some teams out there with more experience. (And the "High Performance" team in the list is composed of top players chosen by USA Curling and groomed for Olympic competition.) Regardless, the girls are looking forward to playing against these teams and getting experience playing at a national level! It's going to be great!
Of course, as a parent (and in my case also the team coach), there's also the cold, hard reality that it costs a good bit of money to move 8 people (4 players and their parent chaperones) from New England to western Minnesota and feed and house them for 9 days! In fact, our budget shows that it's going to be between $9,000 and $10,000!
We parents are going to make this amazing opportunity happen for these girls however we can... but this is definitely a financial stretch. As a new team[1], we don't yet have any kind of sponsorship, but we're looking into seeing what we can do. I also set up my first ever GoFundMe page at:
https://www.gofundme.com/teamrodgerscurling
And we've had wonderful generosity from so many people that have already helped push us past the 25% mark! It's so great to see so many people wanting to help send the girls to Nationals! (And more donations are definitely welcome!) We are so incredibly appreciative of all the donations to date, as well as the many other ways that people have offered to help.
Now... the countdown is on... in 11 days we'll be on planes to Minnesota for an amazing week of curling!!
P.S. Our daughter Chloe is on the right end of the photo. For those who know curling, she plays "Lead" on the team. (And the photo is arranged in order of Skip, Vice, Second and Lead.)
[1] This is the first year these four girls have been curling together as a team. However, they have each been curling for 5-8 years and one of them (Rebecca) was an Alternate on a Nationals team last year and three of them (Rebecca, Anna and Elizabeth) were in the regional playdowns last year as part of another team. All four of them have been playing on teams in youth tournaments (bonspiels) for the past five years, very often playing against each other! So it's fun to have them all together on one team.
An audio commentary is also available:
Jan 01
TDYR 279 – My Three Words for 2016
As I have for the past few years, I've recorded a New Year's Day episode about my "Three Words" representing my aspirations for 2016. Read more at: http://www.danyork.com/2016/01/my-3-words-for-2016.html
Jan 01
My 3 Words For 2016
So here we go for 2016...
STRATEGY
I've found myself quite "busy" this past year, but the question is whether I've been "busy" with the right things. And more to the point - has there been a reason for some of the things I've been doing.
Not that you absolutely NEED a reason for everything... but we live in an age of distraction, and if we aren't careful it's easy to find that we've frittered away time that we could have spent otherwise.
In 2016 I want to think a bit more strategically about the various activities I'm involved in. To make conscious choices about what I'm doing - and for whom - and why.
And to have a bit more of a plan in some cases.
Some common phrases come to mind:
- Connect the dots.
- Think of the big picture.
- Do fewer things better.
- Less is more.
In some ways this is perhaps a continuation of, or a refinement of, the "Essentials" that I talked about in 2015.
The point is that I want to think and act a bit more strategically this year.
HEALTH
In the chaos of 2015, I let my health slip down in my list of priorities. I haven't been making the best choices in terms of eating or exercise. Sadly, I've gained back 25 of the pounds I lost over the past few years. I didn't run a single race in 2015 - and in fact ran a measly 213 miles over the entire year... not even running at all in the entire month of December, and only a pathetic 6 or 7 miles in both October and November. There are other examples.
I need to change this.
I need to put a priority back on taking care of my health. Because if I don't do it, who will? And I want to be around in the long term for my wife and kids.
REFLECTION
I want to make time this year for more reflection. Caught up in the maelstrom of being "busy", I haven't been taking the time to...
Pause.
Think.
Contemplate.
Reflect.
It's hard to carve out that time to just think about things... to think about how all the dots are connected.
But we need to do so... or at least *I* feel the need to do so.
This time of reflection feeds back into the "strategy" word above... and indeed into the "health" word as some of that reflection can happen while, say, running.
These are my aspirations for 2016... what are yours?
P.S. There is, of course, a fourth word that will consume a great part of 2016 for me... CURLING! Particularly given that my 13-year-old daughter will now be going to the 2016 USA Curling Junior Women's National Championships in two weeks in Minnesota...
An audio version of this post is available:
