Our curling seasons are a few weeks in here in Dallas. We have three leagues going right now, all playing once a week on 4 sheets of ice. We have our fare share of people playing in multiple leagues, myself included, but we are pretty close to 85 members!

Today I want to talk about ice. I would like to preface things by saying that I have only curled in a handful of clubs around the country, all of them were of course arena ice. So needless to say I cannot wait until I get a chance to curl on some real ice. However I have curled on a bunch of various different surfaces, and have some thoughts on the matter. The ice is the soul of your club, more so than your president, more than your club’s “Norm”, and more than if your club had a literal heart in a jar.

What I mean by that is that when it comes down to it curling is about fun, it is just the soul of the game. However when you hurl a stone down the sheet and it starts to fall off the boards right as you let it go, and then you can watch it “snake” down the ice, then the next thing you know your skip has his broom up in the air and is waving it at you as if it were on fire, your fun has gone down. Three ends later you are trying to strike up a conversation with the teams on the other sheets and they have that scowl on their face that makes you cringe and turn back to your own game, your fun has gone down. You close your eyes and just toss the rock down the ice and just letting go whenever, not caring if you hog the stone; the stone ends up in a better place than when you ‘make’ your shot, your fun has gone down. Both teams want to win, but even if you do win it isn’t because you played better, it is because the ice was bad and they didn’t get the same “luck” that you did, you fun goes down.

This all accumulates week after week, until you really start thinking about not showing up. No matter how much you love the sport, you aren’t playing that sport any more, you are chunking rocks down some ice. Wii Curling would be closer to the real thing. So when it comes down to it, if you start to hear people complaining week after week about how poor the ice is, and how they can’t make a shot, or if you are making your shots, but only because you know how to work the ice think of the following. You should start trying to change things and make things so that all players have a good time, as opposed to the few who have figured out how to win on bad ice.