Ok going to give this a spin. Why not. It will be a good way to do something I don’t often do a good job of, which is journaling parts of my life. I figured I will start with a little background.
Like I assume a lot of people I was fascinated by curling in the olympics in the 2000s/2010s with all of the Shuster runs that were mostly failures. I never dreamed I would ever curl myself living in Kansas and Oklahoma. Fun fact Kansas is, I believe, the only state in the US without a single curling club at this point. Christmas of 2017 rolls around, was before the olympics had started that year and my BIL was hosting. He asks my wife and I if we would be ok letting him crash at our house when he came down in a few weeks and did a learn to curl. We were both like dude there is no curling in OKC. He pulls the website up. Interesting. There is a curling club that curls on hockey ice. So we sign up with him. The US actually wins the gold at about 4am the night before we were supposed to go to the learn to curl. We got instantly hooked.
So we start curling the local league in Spring of 2018. We were very very bad in hindsight like everyone is. And honestly that was ok because there were very few decent curlers in our curling club at that point. And unfortunately the few people who knew anything weren’t really the types who would teach you anything. That is not normal for curling people. They are mostly friendly and open to helping newer curlers any way they could. Our club is better about that now by a lot but it really wasn’t then. We really weren’t taking it at all seriously then and that’s fine. A lot of people don’t.
In the fall of 2019 we go to our first bonspiel which is basically an out of town curling party hosted by a club that people travel around from all over to attend. Basically a full weekend of curling and socializing. Typically with a fair amount of drinking. I was hooked. It didn’t hurt we played another team of new people the first game and actually managed to win. The rest of the weekend we got blown out but we really didn’t care. Then COVID happens. We don’t curl again until Fall of 2021.
When we came back my wife and I decided that if we were going to keep curling we should actually try and see how good we could get. She was a very good Track and Field athlete, competing the Jr. Olympics growing up and through college. I had grown up playing golf competitively until ultimately flaming out. We both missed the competitive side of things and decided we should see how far we could go with it. At the time we really didn’t know how to do that. We had no coach, no knowledge on how to get coaching, etc. So we started just curling as much as we could. Curling back to back leagues at home on Sundays, which was all we had, and also traveling to about 9-10 bonspiels a year.
Success, as you would imagine, was fleeting at first. But slowly we started to win more and more. We also met people from out of town who were willing to teach us and informally coach us how to not suck. They would go with us and play with us for a whole weekend and answer questions we had or gently give us advice on how to get better. That, more than anything, changed everything for us. It has, most importantly, resulted in a lot of lifelong type friends all over the place. And also it has given us an avenue to get better that felt like we had no idea how to achieve before. We also met an actual coach at one of these bonspiels who was willing to have us out to his curling club for an entire weekend and give us some private coaching for next to free.
It felt like overnight, about a year ago I went from being someone who’s teams were struggling to go over .500 in OKC leagues and playing 2nd or 3rd was suddenly skipping most of my teams and barely ever losing at home and able to take that show on the road with much greater levels of success. In 2025 I went 24-13-1 over 10 events out of town and made it to several event finals, although I lost each time in this situation. 2026 has had similar results so far. 2 short years before I was setting a goal to win an event final and my spouse told me that was probably an impossible goal. Going out of town to curl is hard because there are quite a few curlers that have been curling since they were kids so beating those teams with a group of misfits who started curling in their 30s in OKC is not easy.
Last year we attempted to qualify for Arena Nationals which is basically the highest level of event for “Arena” curlers in the country. That means you play primarily on hockey ice rather than at a facility that is built and designed for curling. There are 10 regions and somewhere in the ballpark of 100 arena curling clubs in the US, which makes up about half of the total curling clubs. Each region has a playdown to determine their representative at nationals. There are two other spots given to the defending champ and also there is a last-chance event that anyone from any region can play in to get the last spot.
We went into the event last year with a men’s team of 5, including the alternate, that had very little experience both playing together and playing at that level. Our region is generally one of the toughest regions because it has some of the biggest curling clubs in the region, with Omaha being the biggest, and Houston, Dallas and Austin always being quite large. For mens our region has won Arena nationals almost every year it has existed. Last year our region actually finished 1/2 at men’s nationals with one team also getting in through the last chance. So winning our region is actually tougher than the national event. They do peer seeding before the event with each team submitting a ranking of the other entrants. I was happily surprised to see our team ranked 5 of 10 last year going in. I felt like that showed a decent amount of respect for the amount of regional events we had been to and some modest success in them. We ultimately made it out of pool play losing the first playoff game by 1, with a badly timed burned stone in the last end that ultimately lost us the game. We were all upset but proud of how we had done.
The real push for this actually started a month or so ago. We had a bonspiel in Omaha that I skipped we went 3-1 to end up in the 2nd event final which we ultimately lost on a tiebreaker shot to the button after making a huge comeback from 7-2 down in the last few ends. That spiel is on arena ice so generally speaking one of the easier spiels but not particularly easy for an arena spiel imo. The other game we had lost in the earlier rounds was also by 1 where the other team made a do or die shot to win the game on the last stone. We also went to a cashspiel last weekend at Rock Creek in Denver. That is on dedicated ice so in and of itself a tougher field on average. A cashspiel also has prize money. We ended up going 2-2 in that falling one game short of the money. We lost to an U18 team in the last game that had made US Nationals 3 years in a row and are now in the process of aging out. It was not close lol.
I’ve already gone way too long but here is the schedule I have left prior to playdowns in July. There might be an addition or two as well to this prior but this is what I have locked in. Most of these I am not playing with my actual playdowns team, which is a subject I’ll have to leave for another post:
-Tulsa - this weekend
-Austin - Memorial Day weekend
-Dallas - July 9-12 - Probably streamed
-MACA Playdowns - Blaine, MN - July 23-26 - Definitely streamed
Nationals are in November so if we qualify(or even if we don’t) there will be some curling between playdowns and there as well. Oh ya and my undefeated league team goes for the league championship at our home club tomorrow night as well.
