One of the most popular sports to watch during the Winter Olympics is one you rarely hear about outside of it: curling.
That doesn’t have to be the case. A volunteer-run group in the Bay Area that operates a world-class, dedicated curling facility in Oakland — the only such facility in California — is working to change that by inviting people to try the sport for themselves.
Visitors to the San Francisco Bay Area Curling Club might just find themselves in an introductory class taught by instructors like Adriana Camarena, the captain of the Mexican national women’s team. Where else can you find such high-ranking athletes volunteering to introduce absolute novices to a sport?
“We’re obsessed,” Camarena says. “We love this game.”
Three of her friends joined her introductory lesson on a recent Friday evening, along with this reporter. We each donned a pair of grippers – rubber shoe covers to avoid slipping on the ice – and stepped onto the ice to learn more.
She guided the group through a progression of practice rounds, offering instructions on how to launch and throw the stones and sweep the ice, and we soon were ready to play a game against another set of beginners.
While our two rounds of scrimmaging yielded a whopping score of 0-0, the game itself felt accessible yet challenging, combining elements of shuffleboard, chess, skating and, yes, physics. Plus, I have to admit, I’ve never had more fun sweeping a broom.
While my group of beginners played on one half of the ice, across the ice was a league game at play among club members with less than five years of experience in the sport.
Their rounds offered a better example of how the gameplay works: The skip, or captain, of the team, stands at the far end of the ice. He or she points to the “button” or the center of the “house” — that’s the large target of concentric circles where points can be scored — and then indicates which way the thrower should spin their stone to make it curl (that’s where the sport’s name comes from).
After that, the thrower launches off of the hack (a secure foothold, like a starting block) while sliding a 40-plus-pound, smooth stone (also called a rock) and then releasing it spinning across the ice. From there, the team’s two sweepers use special brooms to help warm the ice and enable its slick glide toward the target.
Each team takes turns playing eight stones (with each player taking a turn delivering the stones). At the end, the team with the stone in the house closest to the button scores, and gets an additional point for every additional stone that it has in the house closer to the button than the opposing team’s closest stone.
Sportsmanship is a mandate here, and after the game, everyone shakes hands, says “good curling,” and heads off the ice for some “broomstacking” — that’s curler lingo for grabbing a postgame beer.
One of the players in the Friday league game was Lana Nelson, who took her first curling class in September. She’s going to be seeing the Olympics as a spectator this winter and wanted to learn more about curling. But she stuck around for the good vibes. “You don’t need to have experience,” she says. “It’s a great sport to try if you always wanted a rec league.”
Another curler is Benjamin Schechter, a Berkeley High School student who’s been playing for about two and a half years. The sport isn’t as popular with young people as it is with adults, even though, he says, “to me, it’s the most inclusive sport out there.” Schechter recently started a curling club at his high school — the only such club in California, he says.
“It’s a really friendly sport,” says Camarena.
The sport is also growing in popularity among older adults looking to stay active. Former fencer Ed Callan made the switch to curling about a year ago and hasn’t looked back. “I’m hooked,” he says.
Cindy Ward, who began curling just this past September, said she was looking for a sport as she ages that’s team-oriented, social, challenigng and not expensive. “It really checks all the boxes for me,” she says. “The best thing about curling is the people.”
The world-class training facility owes its existence to the dedication of a group of volunteers, who scrimped and saved for well over a decade to get their own curling space.
The ice that’s needed for curling is different from the glass-smooth surfaces needed for hockey or figure skating, and trying to curl when a stone can easily get caught in a leftover skating rut on the ice can be really frustrating, Camarena says. The ideal curling surface involves an ice sheet that is pebbled, or treated with drops of water, which helps to decrease the friction the stone faces against the surface area of the ice. They also used distilled, deionized water.
To get good at the sport, regular access to ice with this special texture is critical, Camarena says.
In the four years since the facility opened, many of the club’s members have leveled up their skills in a big way. While the club isn’t sending anyone to the Olympics this year, several club members expect it’s just a matter of time until they do. There are six members of the club participating in national events this season, the most they’ve ever had, and some have only been playing the sport since the facility opened.
Additionally, the club counts among its members participants on national and international teams for the U.S., Puerto Rico (which competes separately from the U.S. in the Olympics), Mexico, Saudi Arabia, India and the Philippines.
“This is a thing we all made happen,” says Kate Garfinkel, a longtime club member and volunteer who helped to lead the fundraising and oversight for the Oakland curling facility. She will be competing at the Women’s U.S. Nationals Championship in Charlotte at the end of February.
The club counts about 265 people as its members, and still has room to grow. Trial classes ($45) offer 90 minutes of instruction and play, plus a drink credit and $40 towards additional curling.
“It’s easy to learn; hard to master,” Camarena says.
Details: Open 6-10:30 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 6-11 p.m. Wednesdays, 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturdays and 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Sundays,closed Fridays, at 8450 Enterprise Way, Oakland; bayareacurling.com.
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