Nation’s top curlers hit Everett for US championships

Some of the nation’s top athletes are gathering in Everett this weekend for a shot at making it to the Olympics.

Their sport of curling, however, remains a mystery for many of us with a lot of shouting, slipping and sliding.

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But for the 18 men’s and women’s teams coming from all over the country, not to mention the thousands of people that love the sport and will crowd Xfinity arena, the USA Curling national championships are a big deal.

“This is the last nationals before the Olympics so if people come out, they’re going to see the next Olympic team” said Tom Fitzgerald, one of dozens of volunteers from Seattle’s Granite Curling Club helping pull off the championships.

The club is one of the only dedicated curling rinks in the entire western United States. For decades it was the only one.

Fitzgerald says the championships are a great way to bring the best curlers from all over the country to one place and showcase the sport they love.

“The most players come from Minnesota and Wisconsin but there’s players from New York and pretty much all over the country. We have a lot of local people from Seattle that curl out of the Granite Curling Club including the Brady Clark team. They won last year’s national championship,” he said.

Watching the players gracefully slide their big round rocks down the 146-foot long ice sheets while teammates furiously sweep with a modified broom, it looks a bit like a slippery game of shuffleboard.

But volunteer championship marketing director and avid curler Charlie Anthe says there’s far more to the game than meets the untrained eye.

“It’s very easy to learn and difficult to master. And there are so many nuances to the sport. The athleticism, the strategy, teamwork is super important,” Anthe said.

The rules are simple. In a nutshell, the object is to get the rock as close as possible to the center of a circle — known as the house. One team gets points for however many rocks are closest. After eight or 10 rounds, the team with the highest score wins.

And the deal with the brooms? Anthe says it’s all about creating friction and heating the ice, which can dramatically impact the distance and direction of the rock.

“And at the elite level, these players through sweeping can do what we call ‘drag a rock’ an extra 12 or 14 feet of distance, which is really impressive,” Anthe says.

Those rocks are something special as well — a connection to the game’s origins in Scotland centuries ago.

“The rock is solid granite.  It weighs somewhere between 40 and 42 pounds.  And interestingly all of the official curling rocks all come from the same quarry off the coast of Scotland since the sport started,” Anthe says.

Even the ice is special. It takes days to lay thin layers of purified water to create a sheet with a top layer that actually has small bumps they call pebbles — akin to goose bumps — that help promote smooth sliding.

And Anthe says while it’s highly skilled, it’s also an easy game for anyone to get into — whether at the Granite Curling Club or even at the national championships over the next week at Xfinity Arena.

“We are actually having a special half-length sheet on the floor next to the competitive ice where, in between games, anybody can come down and we’ll have volunteers who are going to teach people. You get to practice throwing a rock, sweeping, and hopefully get people hooked on the sport,” Anthe said.

The US Curling national championships officially get underway Saturday night at 6 p.m. with a gala opening ceremony featuring bagpipers and other odes to the game’s Scottish roots. They run through the following Saturday. Tickets are as little as $10 for an all-day pass, and are available online or at the Xfinity Arena box office.

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