A Dream

As I was watching the USA Men's Curling team losing yet another game in the 2014 Winter Olympics, a commercial came on advertising the NBC Gold Map, a guide on how to get involved in an Olympic sport. That commercial was perfectly timed, because I was feeling inspired by our failure. We should not be doing this bad. As I traversed the guide, I found that even in my home state of Georgia, there is a local curling club, the Atlanta Curling Club. At that moment, I had a dream. A dream of standing atop the podium as the American flag flies high and the Star Spangled Banner plays proudly. This dream propelled me to make a plan.

I texted my friends that I knew also enjoyed watching curling, telling them of my dream, and three of my friends jumped out, excited to share the dream and the glory of Olympic gold. These three friends, and now teammates, are Zack Carter, Jonathan Owens, and Phil Stephens. We had a meeting on skype to establish our goals and plan of how to get to Pyeongchang, South Korea for the 2018 Winter Olympics. This brings the story into the present. We have signed up for a learn to curl event at our local curling club, and soon will sign up for league curling to hone our skills. We decided that this story is too good to be kept to ourselves, and created a blog, facebook page, youtube channel, and twitter account. We chose On The Rocks as our team name, though soon we will shed that for Team USA.

So that is the story of how a bunch of High School Sophomores from Atlanta, Georgia decided to go to the Winter Olympic games in Pyeongchang, South Korea in curling of all sports.

I hope that any of you reading will follow our journey as we chronicle it on this blog, and hopefully be inspired to undertake a similar project.

-Connor