Welcome to TonySPN, a semi-regular series in which Content Creator and Resident Sports Aficionado Tony takes you through obscurities and amusing oddities in the world of sports. Don’t worry, “No More Sports Questions!” folks, we’ll make this fun.

We’re a few entries into TonySPN, and while I’ve been able to explain the rules of sports like Pesäpallo and Kabaddi, it comes to you completely without first-hand experience and knowledge. For most sports, this is going to be a trend. I’m a replacement-level player on a Trivia company’s kickball team. My athleticism is off the charts, as in, no one needs to bother charting it.

Today will probably be the one exception in this series. Over the past year, I’ve been doing on-the-ice research on curling, partaking in leagues at my beloved neighborhood Frogtown Curling Club.

Chances are, you might not have thought about curling since about February, when the Beijing Olympics took place. My reason for guessing that is because, as FiveThirtyEight points out, curling-related searches on Google peak hard during the Winter Olympics, then lay dormant for four years. This isn’t unique among Winter Olympic events, it’s just notable that, like figure skating, it captures so many people’s attention during the Games.

This might well have been me, if one of my trivia teammates hadn’t pointed out sometime in 2021 that there was a Curling Club in the neighborhood. The only problem then? We knew nothing about the game, and wanted someone to shepherd us along as our team captain, or “skip.”

Turns out, it’s nice to have a skip to guide you, but it’s not necessary. So why did we delay trying out a sport until we found one? Curling can be a bit intimidating if you’re starting from scratch. The game is often referred to as “Chess on Ice” and it is very easy to get down strategic rabbit holes. Trust me, you should see my team’s internal chat.

You can probably play for decades and pick up new things, but the basics of the sport are pretty simple. There’s a set of circles on either side of the ice (here’s a diagram for the visual) called the “house.” Your goal is to slide out from the “hack” (think like a runner’s starting block) with a rock and guide it as close to the center of the house (the “button”) as possible.

The scoring is also deceptively simple. Is your team’s stone in the house and closest to the button? Congrats. You get a point. You also get a point for every other stone you place in the house… with one small complication.

You can only score on stones that are closer to the button than your opponents’ nearest stone. Look at that diagram again. Let’s say, for example, we have a stone directly on the button, another on the red circle, then another that’s just barely touching the outer edge of the blue ring (a “biter”). That’s three stones in the house, and three points.

If our opponent has a stone in the white circle, our scoring area shrinks to the radius between the button and our opponents’ stone. This leaves out our biter. If our opponents’ closest stone is instead touching our directly-on-the-button stone, our first stone counts, and the other two are left out of the scoring.

Got that? Great. You understand enough about curling to get on the ice and start playing.

From there, it’s just getting a feel for how to deliver those rocks into the house. The most important element to this is your slide. For this, you’ll need one of your feet to be as smooth as possible.

There are two ways to do this. If you’re a beginner, you’ll likely slide step on a pad with teflon and slide out on that. Once you feel comfortable making the investment, you can get shoes that have the teflon permanently attached to one sole. You start from a crouched position, then kick out from the hack and glide (you hope) gracefully along with your stone.

As you approach the “hog line”–this marks where you must release the stone at one end, and what point your stone must pass to be in-play–it’s time to release the rock. Crucially, you do not want to simply take your hand off it. You want to give the handle a small turn (about 10-to-2 on a clock face to direct it towards the right, or 2-to-10 for left) to guide it.

Simply releasing it makes the path of the stone unpredictable, like a knuckleball in baseball. You want the rock to curl (Hey! That’s the name of the game!) in order to better predict its path, and to also be able to get around and behind other stones in play.

Now we get to the sweepers! What’s up with those brooms, anyway, you may have wondered? Their job is to influence the path and distance the stone travels. The ice itself isn’t a flat surface, it’s sprayed (or “pebbled”) to form bumps on the ice. This makes it easier to walk on, and provides friction to slow down a sliding stone.

The sweepers monitor the speed of the rock, judge in real-time where it’s going to stop, and can opt to sweep to make it go farther and/or straighter. Sweeping smooths out the ice in front of the stone, and delays the effect of the curl.

Is it hard work? You bet, you might get sore for a day or two after a game with heavy sweeping. But there are few feelings in the game more rewarding than your frantic sweeping getting your teammates’ rock to the exact spot it needs to be. The sense of accomplishment is quite a rush.

You’ll get a chance to experience the feeling of a good sweep in any game you play. There are no designated throwers or sweepers. Everyone throws twice per round (or “end”), and they sweep when they aren’t throwing. The only exception is the skip, who stands in the house and calls plays until they throw the team’s last two stones.

And that’s the game. You try to put stones in your house, guard them, maneuver around your opponents’ stones, or take them out of the house altogether. Anything that your skip deems necessary to maximize your chances of scoring, and scoring as many points as possible. We won’t discuss strategy here, but there are many playstyles that you and your team can adopt.

If you find yourself reading this and wanting to find a Learn-to-Curl, or join a beginners league yourself, here are my thoughts that I’ve taken from my first year of playing:

You don’t need someone who knows what they’re doing to start playing, even though reconnecting with a friend and experienced curler from college definitely helped. I’ve found the curling community, especially at lower levels, is incredibly helpful, supportive, and full of good advice. Opposing teams are often willing to help you learn, and if you’re in a beginner’s league, everyone else is (or was recently) in the same boat.
Stretch or you will die. Anything leg related tends to be the first thing that starts giving out when I don’t stretch, but you’ll also be surprised with how sore your arms and sides will get if you jump straight into sweeping.
Dress warm, but not too warm, and crucially, make sure your pants are flexible (no jeans!). It’s cold in the rink, but you’ll also warm up as you move. Pro move is to bring layers and find out what’s right for you. Though if you’re bold enough to rock a pair of Zubaz as your curling pants, you will get compliments. Trust me.
Clubs usually (always?) provide sliders and brooms to curlers who don’t have their own. If you’re going to start investing in it, get the shoes first. Sliders work fine, but getting shoes makes a big difference with consistency in delivering rocks.

If you can get into a bonspiel (what curlers call their tournaments), do it, even if you’re not very good yet. It’s the best way to get experience playing multiple times in a day or weekend, you’ll meet and learn from a lot of new people, and who knows? You might make some life-long memories, like when Team Eagle Fang FC (pictured above) took runners-up* in our first spiel together. I’m never going to forget it, and I’m in this game for life. Hope to see you out on the ice someday!

*Runners-up in what was technically the “losers bracket,” but please don’t read this part