Our biggest supporter is 85 years old!

Since this is the first posting on Cadiens Corner, I thought I would tackle a delicate issue in curling and that is sponsorship.

Most curlers are your everybody teacher, produce worker, administrative support person or student who work their butt off five days a week and also have other commitments. To compete at the highest level, it is now almost a necessity to go away every weekend or every other weekend and compete in bonspiels.

Our team wants to play in more tournaments and become more competitive...we actually want to try and go out for the provincial qualifiers this winter but it has been a frustrating summer trying to find a sponsor.

This does mean a good chunk of change - for entry fees, hotel fees, food and gasoline - and without a dedicated sponsor this is the difference between a contending team and one that lives in a fantasy world.

But the reluctance of these big-time organizations to provide a small amount of cash - between $250 and $500 - to help four dedicated individuals while gladly forking over thousands of dollars for some tea and crumpet function with no purpose makes you wonder why they bother sponsoring any events at all.

Casino Nova Scotia and Olands Brewery were the two major companies to reject our proposal. It isn't as if we were asking for the world. Here is an example of a letter we sent to Olands earlier in the summer:

Our proposal to you consists of the Brewery contributing between two hundred fifty and five hundred dollars for the 2005/06 curling season. This is for the purchase of four team jackets with the Olands logo on the back (or front) and our last name as well. Since we play between 60-70 games a year this will mean great exposure for the Brewery.

The rest of the money will go to tournament entry fees as well as our Sunday league 50/50 draw as each team in that league is responsible for donating prizes twice during the year. The Cadiens would purchase Olands merchandise as the prize so some of the sponsorship money would actually come back to you.

It doesn't end there, however, as we will put a link to the Brewery (with a picture of the logo) on our webpage as listed down below. Our website had the most hits out of close to 100 teams on curlingrocks.com so this will mean even more exposure for the Brewery.

I thought this would be a good partnership but the Brewery quickly threw cold water on the plan. I also sent Bruce Oland a copy of the letter to his residence and I was surprised to get a call from the gentleman himself in early August. He seemed interested in sponsoring us but I embarrassed to find out he had been retired for 30 years and was pushing 85 years old!

In the end I guess it was a good thing that Olands rejected us as I later found out they refused to give money to a golf tournament in which the proceeds were going to sick children.

So it doesn't appear as though we will get a sponsor this year but we'll keep battling. We didn't expect too much to begin with but I'd like to thank Mr. Oland for at least having the class to call me up when he could have thrown that letter in the trash like many other companies probably did.

Next time I'll talk about our plans for the upcoming season which is just three weeks away.

Cheers everybody!

http://www.curlingrocks.com/team/rajuncadiens