Bocce ball on ice

It hit me like a bolt from the blue.

More precisely than horsehoes, curling is bocce ball on ice. Same basic strategy and mechanics, the biggest difference being curling’s broom brushes. And both are considered generational sports, passed on from parents to children, fathers to sons.

That’s when I remembered something I scrolled across some months back on my social media feed, a post from Serra High School dean of students Raymond “Huggy” Baldonado, titled “Bocce champs!”

Sure enough, Baldonado’s recent foray into the world of bocce ball is a generation thing. A member of the San Mateo Elks Lodge, Baldonado spends much of his time there in the summer months at the swimming pool with his two sons, Andre, 8, and Jordan, 3. So, last summer, with a group of his fellow pool-going dads, Baldonado joined a bocce team called the Saint Greg’s Dads.

The claim of “Bocce champs!” is legit. Baldonado, along with teammates Temo Barrera, Ken Callegari, Tony Catali and John Langridge, joined the Wednesday night adult mixers league, despite not having much bocce experience between them.

“We had never really played competitively, you could say,” Baldonado said, “and we ended up playing some guys and their wives that were pretty good.”

Not only did the season start slowly for the Saint Greg’s Dads, it took them some time just to hammer out the rules.

“Everyone knew more about it than we did,” said Baldonado, who last played 15 years ago with a couple friends, but never took it seriously until last summer. “We were definitely the young rookies of the group.”

Baldonado is a serious competitor, though. I know this from years of seeing him coach various sports at Serra and College of San Mateo, but first got acquainted with his competitive edge when I met him after Serra’s 23-22 loss to Oak Grove in the 2006 Central Coast Section football semifinals. He was a perfectly polite high school senior at the time, but just as perfectly discontent about the end of his varsity football career in a stunning back-and-forth battle that ended in an Oak Grove fourth-quarter comeback.

Last summer, it was the Saint Greg’s Dads that wrote the comeback story, going from a 12-2 loss in the regular season, to a 15-7 win a few weeks later against the same team in the championship game.

“We were pretty dialed in by the end of summer,” Baldonado said. “We got into it. And the key to it was kind of consistency. ... By nature, we’re all pretty competitive. So, we got into it.”

As part of my curling-bocce ball likeness hypothesis, I asked Baldonado if he could compare bocce ball to any other sports. In an effort to be true to the science, he didn’t mention curling, instead likening the approach more to shuffleboard and the throwing mechanics more to bowling.

When I brought up the Winter Olympics, and specifically curling, he too made the connection.

“I love it,” Baldonado said of the sport of curling, which made its debut as an official Olympic sport at the 1998 Nagano Winter Games, but was a demonstration sport in 1988 and ’92. “I can’t sit there and watch a whole game, but I love the last round. ... I love watching the crucial shots.”

So, we started joking about the prospect of bocce ball finding its way onto the Olympic itinerary by the 2028 Summer Games which will be held in Los Angeles. It has before, as an exhibition sport in 1900 and ’24. So, maybe there is reason for the Saint Greg’s Dads to dare to dream of Olympic gold.

.... Or, if bocce ball doesn’t catch on as an Olympic sport, perhaps a switch to curling to make a run at the 2034 Salt Lake City Winter Games.