There are four sounds you’ll hear most on any given night at the Triangle Curling Club: sweeping, shouting, rocks smashing, and the never-ending buzz from an industrial size dehumidifier — that’s how the club keeps the ice cold and dry in a state with North Carolina’s climate.
On a recent evening at the club in southeast Durham, Sarah Cornel shouted instructions as her teammates pressed down on their brooms and brushed hard against the ice. Those furious sweeps help alter the speed and trajectory of a large granite stone, pushed down the ice by another team member.
“It’s such a fun sport,” says Cornel, a founding member of the club. “It combines athleticism and strategy; it’s really unique like that. You have to read the ice kind of like you read golf greens. You have to figure out the next shot, but you still have to have the athleticism to make the shot.”
It’s a sport played, primarily, in very cold locations. But for more than 25 years, the Triangle Curling Club has been a home for folks in central North Carolina who have caught the curling craze.
Some of the club’s members grew up with the game in the north, or took an interest in the sport after seeing it on TV. Every four years with the Winter Olympics, the club sees a spike in interest, and this year — as the games play on in Beijing — is no different. Much of the club’s upcoming “Try Curling” lessons are already booking up quickly.
“It is harder than it looks, but for most people, it's less frustrating than your first golf lesson,” says Sue Mitchell, a longtime club member and volunteer.
The club closed for 18 months at the beginning of the pandemic, but has bounced back over the past few months, hosting curling league matches most nights of the week. Just in time to attract new members, the club is back on its feet — or rather, back on the sheet.
Learning to curl
Think of curling as a cousin of shuffleboard — or a distant step-cousin of cornhole. The goal of the game is to get more of your team’s stones closer to the button in the house than the opposing team in each end.
Still puzzled after reading that? Here’s a quick explainer:
- Stones are those big spherical objects being released down the ice. Sometimes called rocks, they typically have colored handles – usually yellow and red. They weigh between 38 and 44 pounds.
- A broom or a brush are just that. After a stone is thrown, two teammates will step and slide along with it, sweeping in front of it to create friction on the ice to change its path or to keep it moving.
- The house is the collection of rings at the opposite end of the ice. The outer ring is 12-feet in diameter. Inside of it is an 8-foot ring, a 4-foot ring, and the very center – also known as the button. That’s what each team is aiming for. Think of the button as a bullseye.
- Oh, and the last rock thrown is called the hammer. Typically, it’s used to knock opposing rocks out of the house.
- An end is like an inning in baseball. In each end, each team throws eight stones and a score is taken.
Sarah Cornel started curling in her mid-20s in Ottawa, Canada. And she assumed that when she moved to the Tar Heel State in 1992 that her curling days were over.
And then one day, she opened up an edition of the Raleigh News & Observer.
“We had no idea. I never thought there would be curling in North Carolina. And we noticed in the newspaper – remember when you looked at newspaper ads – there was an ad about ‘Come and find out about curling,’” Cornel said. “So we turned up and there was a handful of other people that turned up.”
That was in 1995. The ad was penned by Evelyn Nostrand who, like Cornel, had curled up north. Nostrand and her husband John hailed from Connecticut and had just moved to Pittsboro. They had ambitions to start a curling club when they discovered that one didn’t already exist in the Triangle.
About 35 people responded to that original ad, including Cornel and her husband Brian Chick. In February 1996, the founding members of the Triangle Curling Club threw their first rocks and played their first season at the Daniel Boone Ice Center in Hillsborough.
The club was nomadic for the first two decades it existed. Members curled wherever they could find ice in central North Carolina – a search that took them from Garner to Wake Forest and everywhere in-between. And everywhere they went, the club found itself competing for ice time with skaters and hockey players. And they had to deal with lines and deformities in the ice caused by skates and Zamboni machines.
“You'd be asking somebody who's playing Pinehurst to go play putt-putt,” longtime member Sue Mitchell says. “You know, we don't want marks and lines on our ice, just like a golfer wouldn’t want that. It's very much like a green in golf. You want it to be as pristine as possible”
The club quickly realized that – to survive, thrive and grow its membership – it would need to buy its own dedicated space specifically for curling.
In 2015, that dream finally became a reality when the club had raised enough money to buy a plot of land. After getting re-zoning approval from the city of Durham, it built its venue, complete with four curling sheets, locker rooms, and a bar and lounge area. Some of the stadium seats inside the clubhouse are recycled from the Carolina Panthers’ stadium in Charlotte.
The club doesn’t have any full-time employees and is instead staffed by members who double as volunteers. Mitchell, for example, helps with marketing and media relations. Others work the bar, pouring pints and cracking open beers after matches. Another group of volunteers manage the ice, cleaning and pebbling it as needed.
“Because you’re all contributing here, it makes it a lot more fun, a lot more social,” says 76-year old curler Mike Hartman, one of the other founding members of the club who first learned to curl while he was in the Air Force, stationed in Germany at a Canadian base.
Curling hasn’t just grown in popularity in North Carolina. Other states in the southeast — such as Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Virginia and South Carolina — all have clubs. In North Carolina, there are also curling clubs in Charlotte and Wilmington.
Olympic frenzy
The Triangle Curling Club typically sees its membership jump every four years, when the winter Olympics are on televisions across the country. The club’s current president, Chris DiPierro, 45, caught the curling bug in 2010, following the Winter Games in Vancouver. He and his wife saw curling on TV and said to themselves, “That looks kind of fun.”
“It's as fun as it looks when you see it out there,” DiPierro says “So, we hope to see the same again [this year]. The U.S. teams could do us a favor again and win again.”
“You got to come try it once,” he added. “You’re not going to be great at it your first time; you’ve got to be okay with that. But it continues to stay fun.”
The club saw its membership peak not long after the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, where the U.S. men won gold in curling for the first time ever. It attracted newcomers through its “Try Curling” lessons, and events where a company or group of people can rent the ice. Eventually, the club had grown by a third, and its membership jumped to 330 members.
The climb back from COVID
When March 2020 came, and the word coronavirus became common vocabulary, the club – like so many other businesses – decided to shut its doors.
“Many curling clubs are a little more paycheck-to-paycheck,” DiPierro said. “We've been fortunate to have so much corporate and outside interest for rentals that we were able to choose not to open for a whole year. We survived that pretty well.”
In September 2021, after consulting with medical experts, the club reopened. In addition to brooms and shoe grippers, masks also became part of the mandatory curling attire. The city of Durham has its own mask mandate, and the club also took the extra step of requiring vaccines after surveying its members, according to DiPierro.
“Like 90% wanted a vaccine requirement,” he said. “It's like, okay, this is kind of easy. Turns out, that’s kind of the obvious decision now.”
The club’s membership took a hit during the pandemic, but it’s still hovering right under 300 members, ranging in ages from 7 to 78.
Andrea Cornel is one of the younger members. The daughter of Sarah Cornel and Brian Chick, she’s 19 and a biology major at UNC-Chapel Hill.
“Didn’t really have a choice. When the building opened, they kind of dragged me out here,” she says of her parents with a laugh. “And then I started curling in the league with my mom.”
Andrea Cornel says a big draw of curling is the community.
“I mean, we all talk on the ice. Everyone is so nice,” she says. “Other teams will congratulate you on a good shot. And then you stand around after and talk and hang out and just get to know people.”
For advocates of curling, those are the top selling points for the sport: It’s accessible to people of all ages, of all shapes and sizes, and of all skill levels. And after each match, the losers clean the ice while the winners buy the first round of beers.
All you need are shoes, a broom and – as Sarah Cornel says – “a little bit of flexibility.”
