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End of the 2018/2019 season.

The 2018/2019 curling season has reached its peak. Internationally, this means that all of the World Championships in the Olympic disciplines have been played. At the same time in the Czech Republic, all the adult national champions who will wear the national shirts in the upcoming season in Men's, Women's and Mixed Doubles are known. Like all those who are trying to improve the quality of Czech curling, I am doing my own analysis. I believe I can identify new trends in technique, tactics, communication and equipment and then apply them to my own coaching work. The Women's World Championships showed a consistently very good level of Europe and Asia and a slightly stagnant Canada. The men's world presented strong European teams (Sweden, Switzerland) that easily compete with the Maple Leaf representatives. Canada, however, has a number of other excellent teams in the men's division that would reach for a medal at the World Championships, even a gold one. The Mixed Doubles competition is marked by an open format that puts 48 countries into the tournament, divided into six groups that simply cannot objectively be of comparable standard. To illustrate, both finalists came from the same group. The only Czech participant in this year's World Championships, the Paul couple, qualified from second place mainly thanks to great finishes in key duels with China and Italy. The subsequent progress to the quarter-finals over Olympic medallists Norway can be considered a success also because it achieved the goal of qualifying for the main part of the Mixed Doubles World Championships next year. And that will be for Olympic points.

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The main Czech competitions ended at the beginning of April with the Women's National Championships. The four-team tournament, played over six long days on just two dedicated lanes (numbers two and three), certainly had its highlights. After two wins by the favourite from Libok, there were four losses in a row that almost sent the current representatives home early. Three of the four losses came after extraordinary last stones by the opponent. Especially the double played by Petra Vinsova (Savona M) in a time pressure and in a difficult situation was absolutely phenomenal. Similarly, Linda Klímová's hand played, perfectly placed angle freeze was par excellence. But the most hardworking Czech team of the last years came to life in the extra time and secured the title with a string of three wins. Fifth in the standings. In the end, the toughest opponent for the Kubešková team was the Zbraslav team, led by Zuzana Paulova, who played an excellent tournament. Looking at the overall curling events and trying to compare the Czech way and the world development, I cannot help the impression that we are overstepping the mark. The attempt to restrict the playing of wicks (chips) in some Canadian competitions seems to me to be symbolic because of the high success rate of this type of throw. However, the Czech teams have not yet managed to fully incorporate this instrument into common use. The five-stone free guard zone is perceived as an insignificant rule change in our country and almost no one deals with it expertly. This is a shame and an obvious handicap.