A Brush With Curling
This story was awarded 3rd place at the 2022 New England Better Newspaper Competition by the New England Newspaper and Press Association for Best Sports Feature.
When I was invited to the Cape Cod Curling Club’s media day, the first thing I did was graciously accept and the second thing I did was Google “how to play curling.”
A stranger to winter sports and activities, my only interactions with curling up until this point were through my TV screen. But now I was going to be the one on the ice, hurling the stones, doing the sweeping and screaming—at least, that’s what I thought. But what I learned is that there is a lot more to curling than meets the eye.
I will say this: curling is a blast. It is not hard to learn or really even to play, but I did realize that it certainly takes a lot of skill and practice to play it well. A lot of thinking, observing, and strategic planning are involved, and all of this takes place during a series of “ends,” which are kind of like baseball innings, during which each team of four throws eight stones—two per player—for a total of 16 stones.
A game of curling usually lasts eight or 10 ends, which is impressive because even playing one end had my 23-year-old self huffing and puffing. As my coach for the day, Eric Robillard, put it, you do not necessarily need to be in great shape to curl, but it makes you use your muscles in new ways that take a bit to get used to.
Take sweeping, for example. It sounds easy because it is something that people tend to know how to do. But when you, say, sweep your house, it usually is not in such a vigorous manner to intentionally decrease the friction on the floor, so you can slide 40-pound hunks of Scottish granite across it like you do in curling. So it is not hard, per se, but it definitely takes some practice.
Throwing the stones was my favorite part, but it is a bit of a misnomer because it is more of a full body push than a throw. Strapped up with rubber soles on my Adidas, I hit the ice to show Mr. Robillard and my fellow curlers for the day—who included WCAI reporter Sam Houghton, Jeannie Yaroch, who handles public relations for the club, and US Paralympian and Falmouth native Meghan Lino, who also told me I was very good. Turns out, what I have got is pretty good form but a really powerful stone-push, because my stones kept passing through the house instead of landing in it. Landing in it is how you score points.
The “house” is what curlers call the four concentric circles on either end of the ice. Teams score by getting their stones closest to the “button,” or the center, but only one team can score per end, so the team with the stone closest to the button scores points for all of their stones in the house. It may not sound difficult, but it is.
“When you think about it, you’re tossing this 40-pound stone 200 feet and it has into get to an area of like 12 inches in the center,” Mr. Robillard said. “To think about it, that’s crazy, right? And not only do you have to do that, you have to strategize what the other person’s going to do. So that, to me, is a lot of fun.”
Strategy and communication are two of the keys to curling. Each team has a skip, which is the leader who calls the shots. The skip waits in the house and tells the thrower where to put each shot and how to turn the stone, hence the name “curling.”
“We kind of guide it with the hand,” Mr. Robillard explained. “You can see we twist it, so we tell it which way we want to turn. It’s going to turn either way—if you just let it [go] straight, it will eventually go one way or another because our ice is not perfect but we will guide it, we will take the handle and push it this way.”
The game really is all about friction, which is why the stones turn and where the sweeping comes in. Sweeping the ice in front of the stone is exhausting, but your hard work pays off in the form of decreased friction, which makes the stone go farther and can help guide its path. The skip will tell the sweepers when to sweep and when to stop, depending on the stone’s behavior. So what may sound like a lot of aggressive yelling is really just well-intentioned and necessary team communication.
“A good team that has good communication will go very far,” Mr. Robillard said. “And if you don’t have that communication, things go very bad very quickly.”
To have good communication with teammates, you usually need to have some sort of camaraderie. Luckily for me, camaraderie is in abundance at the Cape Cod Curling Club, a fact that was proven to me when not a single person laughed when I slipped and fell while trying to push a stone. In fact, that was when Paralympian Meghan Lino told me I “had a good line,” which made me feel great, despite how bad my hip now hurt.
At the curling club, there are currently about 160 members, ranging from age 5 to 95. Mr. Robillard told me that former club member Ralph Vaccaro, who died in 2019, actually held a Guinness World Record for being the oldest active curler at age 99. Mr. Robillard even said that the reason he got into curling was because of his daughter, who decided she wanted to curl at the age of 5.
“She weighed 36 pounds, and the stones weigh 44 pounds,” he said, laughing. “She went out there and she loved it. She pushed as hard as she could, and the stone only went like, 20 feet, but she was like ‘Daddy, I love this.’”
I understand how she felt, because I, too, now love curling. My team—Mr. Robillard, Mr. Houghton, and myself—beat another trio in what I thought could have been a very close game, because four out of the six of us were newbies. But we had a strategy, and after enacting our “plan B,” we successfully bumped one of our own stones into the center of the house and secured my first-ever curling victory. It was a sweet one, and definitely left me wanting more.
With the Winter Olympics going on in Beijing, I’m likely just one of the millions of people around the world who are just now learning what curling is and getting interested in it. But after playing it, I understand the hype and I can see how curling is one of the fastest-growing Olympic sports.
“Every time there’s an Olympic event, we have a spike of people that come in,” Mr. Robillard said. “I don’t think that on a normal day somebody thinks about curling or Googles curling. They see it on the TV and then they come over, and you see how welcoming we are. We’re open to anybody, whether that be [someone in] a wheelchair, someone who’s 95, or someone who’s 5 years old—anybody can curl.”
The statement “anybody can curl” is not just about having the physical ability to curl; it is about the welcoming environment that is the curling club and seems to be rooted in the curling community itself. Like how before every game, all players fist-bump and wish each other “good curling.” Or how when your team has a great throw, even the opposing team compliments and congratulates you. It is less of a cutthroat competition full of stones, sweeping, and yelling—which is what I had pictured—and much more of a sociable sports environment that allows for the development of skills and relationships while also serving as a great workout.
While it is unlikely that you will see me in the 2026 Olympic Curling Finals, it is much more likely that I will give curling another shot. I cannot deny it: gliding across ice and sending granite hurtling toward the other end are exciting. I could probably improve on my sweeping, but that is for next time. For now, I will leave you with what Mr. Robillard told me at the end of our day:
“You’re really, really good.”
