Diamond State Curling Club board member Dave Yeager says people are curious when he tells them he's in a curling club.
"The first question I get is 'Do you have to wear ice skates for that?' because people don’t know and I'm like, 'no, no not at all, it’s way easier than that,'" he said.
While some people are still unfamiliar with the sport, it is gaining in popularity. According to the U.S. Curling Association, there are 197 curling clubs across the country, up from around 165 a decade ago.
One of them is the Diamond State Curling Club.
Based at the Patriot Ice Center in Newark, the club routinely holds “Intro to Curling” sessions. On a recent Saturday, about 30 people turned out to learn.
Each game starts with a player in a lunge position pushing and releasing a 44-pound granite stone
with the goal of getting it as close to the center of a bullseye 150 feet down the rink. Teams can also gain an advantage by taking out their opponents stones. As the stone travels down the rink, teammates use brooms to sweep the ice, changing the speed and direction of the stone. Experienced curlers say it involves physicality and strategy.
"You’re trying to figure out where I put the broom,
what’s the break in the ice, what’s the tendency of this person when they throw, where should I call them, that’s when you’re doing a lot of thinking and you’re trying to guess, like in chess, what’s my opponent trying to do," Yeager explained.
Jeremy Veenema came to the club to try curling for the first time.
"It’s awesome; I love it. It's really cool. I watch it in the Olympics all the time and I'm like this looks so cool and it’s really awesome; fun to do," he said.
First-timers like Sherri Miller say it’s challenging.
"I've always watched it in the Olympics and I thought it was interesting and I thought, I can do that. But it’s a lot harder than it looks," she said.
The Diamond State Curling Club was founded a little over five years ago by it's previous president, Frank Sharp. His goal was to make sure no one in area had to drive more than 45 minutes to get to a curling club.
He gave the idea a test-run in 2015 in Wilmington, before holding a formal meeting the following year to officially launch the club, recalls current club president Brian Hufe.
"We went to Stewart's on (Route) 40 for our first unofficial board meeting," he said. "My girlfriend raised my hand to join the board and I’ve been in since. It’s a great social thing. I found my people. It’s the politeness, the camaraderie, the wanting to see everyone improve. It's a really great group of people.
It’s a common sentiment among curlers. In fact, club board member Dave Yeager says camaraderie is a curling tradition.
"One of the main traditions in curling is that before the game, you shake hands and maybe in these times elbow bump and you wish everyone “good curling.” "It’s not a game where you talk trash or anything like that," he said.
He says one of the best traditions, known as broomstacking, occurs after the game.
"After a game of curling, it is tradition for the winning team to buy a beer for the losing team. You sit down, have a beer, chat about the game, kind of like the 19th hole in golf if you will."
For Diamond State Curling Club member Herb Kupchik, the people are what’s kept him involved in curling for 35 years. He started playing the sport when he was a professor at Boston University School of Medicine.
"It’s really one big family. I used to tell people when I was in the Boston area at Broomstones Curling Club - we had 350 members or so - and I told people, that’s my family. And if I ever needed anything, they were there and it’s like that here. It’s like that throughout the world," Kupchik said.
And he would know. He’s been an umpire at many national and international curling events, including the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
"There’s basically a list of umpires throughout the world that the World Curling Federation keeps and they invite us to go to international events to officiate. Every four years they go through their list and they say 'ok, who’s going to go this year', and I was lucky enough to go in 2014 in Sochi," he said. "It was a bucket list item....You can't beat it. I had front row seats."
Other club members have done some traveling of their own, visiting other curling clubs for weekend tournaments called “bonspiels.” The curling season typically runs October through March, but the Diamond State club holds events year-round for their growing and diverse membership.
Hufe says they did have a dip in participation during the pandemic going from around 70 members to 25. But since then, he says membership has bounced back.
"By December (2021) we were back up to around 40, so we’re gaining membership even faster than we were when we first started," he said.
Some of that interest was sparked by the Olympic Games, especially after 2018 when the U.S. Men’s team took home it’s first gold medal. The Delaware club celebrated by inviting Tyler George, a member of that winning team, to Newark.
"We got to see the gold medal. He kind of talked through the game end and the winning shot and we got to recreate the shot - the gold medal winning shot - with him and he gave us some tips on what things could be improved, which is a lot when you’re talking to somebody like Tyler George," Yeager said.
The club hopes to do something similar to mark this year’s Olympics. But not everyone who participates in curling has to be an Olympic-level athlete. There’s wheelchair curling and many clubs, like Diamond State, can offer modifications to the game for people with - for example - injuries or other limitations.
Club members say their mission is to introduce as many people to curling as they can. For more information on the club and to register for Intro to Curling events, visit diamondstatecurling.org.
