A bet, World Cups and our team

So, Welcome to my first blog post. First off, I’ll tell you how this blog came to be. My friend Thomsen asked me when I was going to start a blog. Well I had kind of thought of it for a while but never really got around to it. So we had a bet that if I qualified for World Cups this fall I would start one. So here we are.

World Cup trials took place last week in Vancouver at what will be the Olympic venue in 2010. For me, the trials didn’t go as well as I would have liked, but I still managed to skate well enough to get selected to the fall World Cups tours. There are two tours this fall. The first is during the last two weeks of October and we will compete at World Cups in Salt Lake City, Utah and Vancouver, BC. Competing at a World Cup in Canada is awesome and hopefully lots of people will come out to watch in Vancouver and cheer loudly for Canada. It will be the first and only International competition (I think) to be held in Vancouver prior to the Olympics next year. The second tour is the Asian World Cups. They will take place at the end of November and early December in Beijing, China and Nagano, Japan.

The best part about the trials last week wasn’t that I qualified, but that our team had three others that also qualified for World Cups. Jessica Hewitt and Jessica Gregg also qualified for all four stops on the women’s side. J Gregg has done a bunch of World Cups before, but these will be the first ones for J Hewitt. On the men’s side, Richard Shoebridge qualified for the Asian tour. These will be his first World Cups as well. The reason that I say this is the best part is because our team is a fairly small one that is competing in a sport that is dominated by Quebec skaters in Canada. This is the first time in a while that so many western based skaters have been on a World Cup team. With our coach Jon, we have worked hard over the past seasons to slowly improve our rankings and get the experience we need to crack the World Cup circuit on a regular basis. Hopefully we can keep this momentum going until 2010!