Fan of the Month: Adriana Camarena
Adriana in fron of a beautiful mural reltated to a justice cause close to her heart.
About Adriana
From: San Francisco, CA (since 2007), born in Mexico
Home Club: San Francisco Bay Area Curling Club; reciprocal member to Silicon Valley Curling Club and Lake Tahoe Epic Curling
Occupation: Self-employed researcher and consultant on Latin American legal reform (by day) and artist, writer and activist (by night), and very often in reverse order
Years Curling: about 10 years
Question (Q): What has been your favorite Curler Outreach webinar?
Adrianna Camarena (AC): Tough question. I've loved every one, and benefited tremendously from each. The ones lingering in my mind include the Five Rock Rule, which helped me cover some gaps, bookended by the recent Intro to Curling Analytics that gave me insight into the added layer that the pro teams incorporate into their decision-making. At a personal level, I loved Mimi Stevinson's and Steph Thompson's webinars because they helped me tailor my workouts to my needs, and with a restorative outlook. But hey, those ice talks never get old because I only understand half of what goes into ice making.
Forced to make a Skip's call, I'll go with Steph Thompson's recent webinar because with limited ice comes the opportunity to pay attention to physical weaknesses and injuries that are barriers to overall fitness for curling. Smarter workouts are what's on my mind these days.
Q: Do you have any special roles at your club, or leagues/spiels you regularly enjoy? Please describe.
AC: I volunteer frequently to teach LTCs and corporate events. Recently, I volunteered by shoveling gravel and sand as part of the barn raising efforts for our dedicated SFBACC facility.
Q: How did you find curling? What was attractive about it?
AC: Over a decade ago, I was staying up into the wee hours watching this bizarre Winter Olympics sport, and decided it was something I had to try out. Initially, I was attracted by its demands for balance and stability, and delighted by it's social life. But I was ultimately hooked by the intricate details of curling about which you can never stop learning.
Q: Best moment of curling in your life- on or off the ice.
AC: Playing with Mexico's first national curling team and scoring the first point ever for my country in international competition. I played 1&5 rocks at the 2019 World Mixed Doubles Curling Championship in Stavanger, Norway with teammate Ramy Cohen and coach Barry Ivy in the wings. Whaaaat?
Q: Do you have any personal curling goals for the future?
AC: Play for Mexico in the next upcoming World Mixed Doubles Qualifying Event, and this time, win a few games! To get there, my team will have to play down against fellow Mexican curlers in a first Mexican MD Curling Championship, and win.
Adriana in her Team Mexico uniform preparing to go to the 2019 World Mixed Doubles Curling Championship.
Long term, I would like to stabilize a Mexican Women's team. We have many distance and skills challenges to overcome. (Though we did win Silver in the 2019 Americas Challenge and participated in the 2020 World Qualifying Event in Finland, in what feels like one hundred years ago now.)
At a club level, I dream of completing our new dedicated facility, and starting a Black and Brown league to promote diversity in curling. Looking forward to the joy of regular ice time with friends.
Q: Especially in these uncertain times, what does being a curler mean to you?
AC: I believe some of the best work we do is the work we do for free, because some of the best work to be done is undervalued and underpaid.
Right now, for me, to be a curler is to volunteer my free labor where it is most needed. That's at the Mission Food Hub in my neighborhood where I haul boxes (awesome workout by the way) to give away healthy food to the disproportionately impacted and underserved Latinx, Indigenous and undocumented community of San Francisco. The food hub gives out 500-700 boxes three times a week. It's a heroic emergency relief effort organized by local community leaders.
At a curling-specific level, this moment is a tremendous opportunity to reflect on gaps and work on as much off-ice capacity building as possible, including understanding strategy, training, and how I can be a better teammate.
Q: Anything else you'd like folks to know- about yourself, your club, or something else?
AC: My club the San Francisco Bay Area Curling Club needs sponsors to push through the final stages of construction (we're literally ready for flooding!) but the club needs to make it through the COVID-19 closures that impeded a timely start of operations and therefore impacted already strained finances. Here's the donation page. You can also sponsor an entire house ad but you have to hurry, hard, because these might be going in soon!
Finally, in my culture, November 2nd is Day of the Dead, Día de Muertos, a day on which we take time to celebrate our beloved departed by remembering them in their full splendor, quirks and all . This year the celebrations will be particularly deep and meaningful in the context of over a million lives lost to Covid-19 worldwide, the nationwide George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests, the California wildfires and the many other unexpected losses suffered collectively and individually the world over. So, I just want to acknowledge grief and loss in our communities, and praise everyone for doing that thing that helped you avoid going completely nuts during this year. You got this!