Let's go bloody curling!

Last Friday afternoon, we went curling with our Nike Golf clients at the Lloyd Center Mall. My grandparents were both very good curlers back in Scotland, but I had never actually thrown a rock on ice before. It looks pretty easy when you watch it on the Olympics, but it is actually pretty hard. The rock moves a lot faster than you think and it is hard to gauge the right speed to get it to land in the house (the circles). The sweeping is also much more important than you think. You can easily make the rock slide an extra 10 feet or so if you sweep really hard, and sweeping hard can leave you out of breath and sweating.

The key is to get a good push out of the hack (the starting area) so you can slide along and release the rock. If you try to push it as you are sliding, you can easily fall or get it going too hard. It's also hard to tell if the rock is going too fast or too slow which dictates how hard you sweep.

The rules are pretty simple, you have four players per team. You get eight rocks per team. You alternate players with each person throwing two rocks. If you are not throwing, you sweep or captain. The captain shows you where to aim and how hard to throw. If he is good, he can also tell which way the rock is turning on the ice and get you to "curl" it in correctly. Basically, you are trying to get as many of your rocks in the house as possible. The team that has the rock closest to the middle wins a point. You can win a point for every rock you have closer to the middle than the other team. In the first end we played, we got four points because we had four rocks in the house and the other team had none. In the second game, we had three rocks in the house, but only one was closer to the middle than the other team so, we only got one point,

The last rule you have to remember is not to touch the rock when you are sweeping, this is called burning the rock, and takes it out of play. When you are sweeping you want to get right in front of the rock and brush as hard as possible with really short strokes as the rock only glides on a small surface. Another common beginner mistake, letting the rock get past you and trying to run after it. You will slip and fall. Also, don't try to pick up the rock, it weighs 42 pounds and is much easier to slide.