Women's national teams.

The women curlers have barely played the first round of the domestic extraliga marathon and a few days later all the current national teams have already finished their season. First, the women's A team (Kubešková) played the European Championships, where they placed tenth with one win. Then the women's B team (Synáčková), also with one win, finished eighth at the Olympic qualification. And today, the junior women's team (Farkova) ended their national team tenure with a final fourth place finish in one of the three groups at the Junior Women's World Championships - B, after a win over Brazil. Overall, the young players placed eleventh, far behind Spain, but also behind the Lithuanians or Latvians, not to mention the young Turkish women. Thus, none of these Czech national teams qualified for either the winter or the spring peak of the season and only one of them will participate in the extraliga battles in the coming months.

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The results are a confirmation of the downward trend in the quality of Czech women's national teams in recent years. What is happening? It would seem that the explanation for the weaker results could be the ongoing generational change. But this is probably not the case when we consider that eight of the fifteen players are under the age of twenty-five. Moreover, the fact that some curlers are approaching forty or have even crossed it is nothing alarming in our sport. Compared to other countries we are not much worse off in the age parameter - see the Swiss, Norwegian, Canadian or American national teams. The problem is rather that on the world stage we meet professional, semi-professional or female players who have exceptional conditions within their associations. The management teams of foreign national teams have well-paid full-time coaches and consultants - experts - in their ranks. And this combination is the basis of stable and well-functioning teams. What we lack is a sophisticated national programme, containing instruments that respect the specifics of women's sport, which would build on the supportive, targeted programme of the National Sports Agency. In addition, we lack an overall feasible concept of national teams' activities, including measurable goals, economic and time frames, hierarchy of coaching positions, definition of training groups. A concept built on defined duties, required responsibilities, defined rights and a reward system based on coaches' education, experience, work done and achievements. Apparently, the women curling players themselves will have to initiate a process leading to a change in the view of the specifics of women's sport and push their own programme, the aim of which should be to return Czech women back to the elite European and world curling society.