Being ‘well prepared’ vital for Pacific-Asia teams

Erina, Australia
Wednesday 25 October 2017

The World Curling Federation’s Pacific-Asia zone is becoming a rising force in world curling.

A fifth of the World Curling Federation’s Member Associations come from this regional area – and it recently welcomed Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and Saudi Arabia to the curling family. Also, its flagship event, the Pacific-Asia Curling Championships has seen an increase in participation over the past few years.

And, inevitably, with more teams comes more competition!

This year, the Pacific-Asia Curling Championships are being held in Erina, Australia from 2 to 9 November – the countries first international curling event in over 21 years. Japan, Korea and China have had the most medal success at this event in recent years, but there has always been plenty of competition from elsewhere.

Speaking of which, one of the highlights from 2016’s championships was the performance of the Chinese Taipei men’s team. It was the first time that the nation had made the play-offs.

The man who has been a key figure in boosting the reputation of the team is Randolph Shen – the skip and the fourth player for the Chinese Taipei men’s team. He, like two of the three others in his team, lives in British Columbia, Canada. The other member of their team, Ting-Li Lin, is across the border in the neighbouring United States, situated in the northern state of Wisconsin. Although they’re miles away from the nation that they proudly represent, living in North America benefits teams like theirs for training purposes.

“We practise on ice every week, plus each of us individually curl in our club leagues,” says Randolph, “We can also prepare by competing on the World Curling Tour and we do a lot of work with our physical trainer as well as our sports psychologist, who will be our coach in Australia.”

The coach Shen speaks of is Roger Friesen, who has worked with many Canadian Olympic teams and has over 30 years of experience in curling. Although not your traditional curling coach, Randolph is hoping that Friesen’s psychology background will bring a different dynamic to the team, “We acknowledged that we have the skill sets to compete against the top teams and what is lacking is our mental training,” he says. “That’s the main reason why we have stepped up Roger’s involvement with us.

“We have stepped up our weekly meetings with Roger,” says Randolph. Despite improvements in coaching, they still face issues of a small team: “Three of our players have young families and we are mostly a self-funded team.

“We don’t travel and play as much as countries such as China, Japan and Korea.”

With the issues that Chinese Taipei are still facing, Randolph is staying grounded ahead of the championships, “First and foremost we need to play well during the round-robin,” he says. “If we stick to our game plan and I feel success will come if we stay in the moment and not get too caught up on the outcome.

“Last year was the first-time Chinese Taipei made the play-offs. Emotions and excitement got the better of us during the play-offs. If we are lucky enough to reach the final four again this year, it would be easier to put the emotions aside as we’ve already experienced it.”