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If you’re like most Americans, Olympic sports seem daunting and beyond our abilities. We watch throwers toss the 16-pound shot over 70 feet with ease, high jumpers clear eight feet and women rip through the 100-meter dash in under 11 seconds. Never mind the power exhibited in weight lifting, the strength and grace of gymnastics, or the speed of swimmers at every distance. It is amazing.
But if you watch the winter Olympics, those people tossing the strangely shaped rock kettles and sweeping furiously in front to them…well, maybe you could be a championship curler. If only it were that easy. At a restaurant at Denver International Airport while on a trip home from Pittsburgh last spring, we sat next to a table of curlers out of Houston, Texas. What they told me about their sport was enlightening.
Curling appears every four years on American television during the Winter Olympics where it gets rave reviews, but after a few weeks, the sport fades in the national spotlight only to return to the world stage at the next Olympiad.
That’s not the case for a growing number of athletes who enjoy the challenge of a sport with the strategy of chess, combined with the balance of a gymnast and the hand-eye coordination of a national champion bowler. Curling presents all of those challenges on a sheet of incredibly smooth ice from 100 to 150 feet long.
Julie Segovia, of Houston who holds a PhD in nursing, and Alyssa Parks a chemical engineer, both are ardent curlers. Parks began curling later in life, while Segovia grew up curling as a child in Canada, before rejoining the sport after a 27-year hiatus.
Their teammates Heather Cook, Jessica Bostwick, and Sara Whiting are all Houston area professionals as well Their coach is Greg Major, a Houston area cement contractor.
“It is a bit of an eclectic group. It really caters to those of us who are nerds at heart, since it is like chess, it is very precise and strategic,” Parks said. “There is a uniqueness to the curling community, there is etiquette. In standard issue competition, we don’t have referees, it is not like very many American sports, there is sportsmanship to it. We call it the spirit of curling. If another team is doing something wrong, you civilly ask them to stop.”
The” Roarin’ Game” as curling was once called originated in Scotland in either the late 15th or early 16th century. The roar came from the noise produced when the granite stone slid over the ice. Curling is one of the world’s oldest team sports and by default, one limited to colder climates where frozen ponds or lakes are available for play.
There isn’t a lot of equipment in the sport, but though it is limited, it is a unique inventory. You need smooth ice, six stones, a couple of brooms, and four players per team. The inventory is small, but getting those four components into a cohesive, competitive group is where the work takes place.
All the stones used in curling come from two small islands off the coast of Scotland. The stones can weigh from 38 to 44 pounds, but 42 is the standard. They are composed of two types of granite, with the harder granite around the perimeter of the stone where it strikes other stones.
“They’re about $600 a piece, “Parks said.
A match requires 10 sheets of ice, and 16 stones, eight of each color. Each of the four team members throws two stones.
“Our arena club has five sheets,” Segovia said. “USA curling has a championship set of rocks they ship to locations.”
Curling has a foothold in the Rocky Mountain region with clubs in Billings, Steamboat Springs, Rapid City, and Ft. Collins.
The Campbell County Curling Club in Gillette is the only one in Wyoming. For more information on curling or starting a curling club https://www.usacurling.org/ is a great place to start.
“There are several layers of national championships,” Segovia said. “We were recently at the arena nationals and won the gold.”
Team Segovia, (the teams are named for the skip,) won the Arena title in Eagan, Minnesota last November. The event brought 12 women’s teams that regularly play on multi-use arena ice.
Team Segovia finished pool play with a 4-1 record. They faced Team Feldman from the Wine Country Curling Club in the semifinals, winning 11-4. In the championship, they beat Team Asis the Silicon Valley Curling Club 5-2 after scoring a decisive three points in the seventh end.
Those layers of competition include Five and Under, for curlers with less than five years of experience, Club curling for teams with seven-day-a-week access, Arena curling for teams that have to share ice, and Elite.
“Elite men and women try to qualify for the Olympics,” Parks said. “In Club Nationals, non-elite, there are 10 regions, you have to win your region to qualify for the national.”
USA Curling treats all events like a national event.
“If you want to create a curling club, instead of spending a million dollars to build a facility, you start by renting ice in an existing arena,” Segovia said. “Hockey ice is easier to find, but much lower quality.”
Arena National Championships is a category for teams that have to train on poorer ice and that have to share that ice with skaters or hockey players.
“You don’t prep curling ice with a Zamboni, our ability to make precise shots is quite different,” Segovia said. “Since we’re sharing ice with hockey and figure skating we don’t have as much access. We get to curl about twice a week.”
“We’ve had many of clubs that start as an arena club then build from there,” Parks said.
Houston, a city where people grow lemons and oranges on their back patio may seem a strange location for a curling club, but it has from 60 to 80 members.
“I started curling in Canada, I was in juniors,” Segovia said. “During the pandemic I was looking for something to do.”
The oldest arena club in the United States is in Houston.
“It’s a source of pride and shame,” Parks said. “We’re the oldest arena club in the nation, but we’ve never won.”
There are four positions on a curling team, skip, vice-skip, and a pair of sweepers.
“Knuckleballs are bad in curling, you always want to put spin on the rock, so it moves predictably,” Parks said. “You’re always throwing the same pitch.”
Segovia is the team skip.
“Her job is to read the ice like reading a green in golf, make the spin you put on the rock. If you throw the rock this hard it will curl 3,4 or 5 feet, she’s like a like a catcher in baseball or a caddy,” Parks said. “It’s a little more like a chess match. You have to think of the objective at the end of the game for your players. You have to think several shots ahead of time.”
Parks is the vice-skip. The vice-skip is a bit of a liaison in a game. Everyone throws two rocks. The skip throws the last two.
“Someone has to be in the house calling the line,” Segovia said. “That’s the vice-skip.”
Curling is challenging from a communication perspective. It’s not structured so the skip can talk to the sweepers. There is no huddle, and no talk, with only one minute between ends. Communication is done with signals since arenas are loud.
Fans of the sport admire the skill of throwing rocks perfectly, but the action comes with the frenetic action of the sweepers. The idea of sweeping is to heat up and melt the ice near the rock to make it slicker and change its course slightly. The broom has evolved since the early days from corn brooms to modern, carbon fiber.
“It’s almost like a Swiffer,” Parks said. “Most of the high-quality brooms are made of carbon fiber, they’re very light. The pad is made of specific synthetic fabric. You don’t want to damage the ice in any way. When you sweep it makes the rock travel farther. If you sweep in front it makes the rock go straight.”
The greatest debate in curling between the Canadians and the Scots is does sweeping make it change direction or not. The jury is out on this one.
The sport had its controversy in “Broom Gate”. It was discovered the fabric of the broom was scratching the ice. The association began regulating so the most powerful sweepers didn’t have an advantage.
“Corn brooms transitioned over time,” Segovia said. “When I curled back in the 80s and 90s in Canada, it was hog hair. When I started again 27 years later, it was fabric.”
Traveling is part of competitive curling.
“We travel a lot to get better, we flew to Canada to get private lessons,” Parks said.
Curling clubs have low costs of entry for new players.
The stones are owned by the clubs, they have club brooms and Teflon sliders you can slide over regular tennis shoes.
“The fanciest brooms cost $180 Canadian,” Parks said. “I have custom-made shoes for $160 and spent $250 get them turned into custom curling shoes.”
“We’re interested in expanding our sport,” Segovia said. “We stream our games on Facebook Live or YouTube.”