Curling is Pretty Fun, Give it a Try

On Monday Tasha and I went out to the Scheels Iceplex with Mitchell Olson to play a sport. Lucky for me it wasn't hockey. (And lucky for Mitchell and Tash.)

We had a friendly game of curling against the morning team from Dakota News Now, Eric Thorstenson, Vanessa Gomez, and Aaron Doudna. (Watch the video of us curling here.) We ended up winning with some made-up rules at the end. We won $250 to give to Cure Kids Cancer thanks to Bug Busters!

Curling wasn't hard to do after a quick lesson. If the gear was just out on the ice and I tried to do it without instruction, I'm pretty sure I would have cracked my head open on the ice. We wore rubber grippy covers on our shoes so we could walk around on the ice. Then there is an ice scraper looking thing you use to balance yourself while you glide along the ice and then you release the stone and put a little tiny spin on it.

Throwing the stone isn't the hard part. Sweeping is much harder to do, or at least, hard to do well. The "broom" is a cloth-covered pad that you sweep with all your weight on it back and forth as fast as you can. What you're trying to do is get a little bit of melting going on so that the stone can slide farther. The guys teaching us were doing this so fast. I could do it with mostly okay technique, but I could not do it with the speed that they did.

If you want to give curling a try, the Sioux Falls Curling is having Learn To Curl classes on February 9 and 16 at the Scheels Iceplex.