Curling considers customs as sport looks to draw attention outside of Olympics
· Yahoo Sports
When Beau Welling was a high school senior, he heard about an odd sport in which people whirled a 44-pound granite block across a sheet of ice, sweeping it towards a target. As he flipped on his television to watch Olympic curling, he hardly gave it a chance.
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“I saw rocks, brooms and ice and thought, ‘This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen in the Olympics,’” Welling said. “And I kind of forgot about it.”
Fourteen years later, during the Salt Lake 2002 Olympics, Welling, the president of the sport’s global governing body, found himself in a similar situation. But this time, with curling as a medal sport, he couldn’t keep his eyes off the screen. With the help of a co-worker, he said he began to understand the nuances and his interest in curling skyrocketed.
Each Winter Olympics, the over 500-year-old sport of curling draws tremendous attention from casual fans in the U.S., but many don’t stay engaged after the Games. At the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics, 1.6 million Americans tuned into the U.S.-Sweden gold medal match in the middle of the night, according to Sports Media Watch. But only about 23,500 people participated in curling at clubs in 2023, USA Curling reported.
As the sport seeks to break that cycle, with the U.S. mixed doubles team winning silver in the Milan-Cortina Games, organizers and participants are eagerly considering ways to modernize the game and grow interest to turn curling into a career for the game’s top athletes.
“The whole business and economics of sport is rapidly changing,” Welling said, “and we all have to be prepared to innovate and evolve.”
The Curling Group, an organization dedicated to “revolutionizing” the sport, is launching curling’s first professional league, Rock League, with six mixed-gender franchises. The first competitions will take place in Toronto, starting Monday, and will offer a $250,000 prize purse.
The Curling Group’s other primary competition, The Grand Slam of Curling, has awarded $2.1 million per season since 2018-19. In comparison, the Brier — Canada’s curling championship — paid $300,000 in 2024. Meanwhile, the World Curling Championships traditionally offer no prize money.
CEO Nic Sulsky said if Rock League attracts interest, young curlers won’t have to grapple with choosing the sport or switching to another game with more money involved. Today, many Olympic curlers also work normal jobs: U.S. curler Korey Dropkin is also a realtor, and his mixed-doubles partner Cory Thiesse is a wastewater laboratory technician.
Sulsky said he wants fans to be drawn in by the spectacle of Rock League events as contests will feature loud crowds, music and a bar between the sheets of ice. He recalled a time when he was talking with another spectator and being shushed by an older fan nearby, an experience he wouldn’t want to happen at a Rock League contest.
“The traditions of the past are only the traditions because, candidly, people need to be daring enough to take a chance and to try to change things up,” Sulsky said.
Feb 10, 2026; Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy; Korey Dropkin of the United States during the curling mixed doubles gold medal game during the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games at Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium.Eric Bolte-Imagn Images
Feb 10, 2026; Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy; Korey Dropkin of the United States during the curling mixed doubles gold medal game during the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games at Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium.
Heather Mair, the chair of recreation and leisure studies at the University of Waterloo in Canada, noted there is a lot of social sanctioning in curling for acts like heckling or laughing at poor shots. She said that type of norm enforcement is excellent for the sport because it’s part of the “spirit of curling” and it teaches young players how to act with sportsmanship.
She said she wants to focus on exposing prospective curlers to the grassroots social traditions. At many of the nearly 200 curling clubs in the U.S., curlers compete through weekly leagues, but often stay for hours after to participate in traditions like broomstacking, in which winning curlers buy losing teams drinks after matches.
Mair said making curling clubs more accessible is key to growing the sport. Young people aren’t always interested in competing in long, 15-week leagues that can cost more than $1,000, so clubs should offer more short-term formats and drop-in hours, she said, to provide casual curling opportunities.
John Morris, a two-time Olympic gold medalist for Canada and strategic advisor for Rock League, said one of the main reasons he fell in love with curling is the social tradition. At the 2018 Olympics, Morris even brought a couple of Molson Canadian lagers to have with U.S. curler Matt Hamilton after competing in a mixed doubles match.
“We cracked one and just played some tunes in the dressing room, and kept that (broomstacking) tradition alive,” Morris said. “At the end of the day, that was the way I was raised.”
Despite curling’s reputation for sportsmanship, an expletive-filled outburst involving one Olympic men’s match last month overshadowed the competition after Sweden accused Canada of cheating by touching the granite portion of the rock after releasing it.
“I'm not necessarily worried about it,” said John Shuster, a 2018 U.S. Olympic gold medalist set to compete for Rock League’s Frontier Curling Club. “We’ve had controversies in our sport constantly over the last decade … It’s just another bump in the road.”
Feb 19, 2026; Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy; Marc Kennedy of Canada, Ben Hebert of Canada and Brett Gallant of Canada in action during their match against Norway in a men's curling semifinal during the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games at Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium.Jennifer Lorenzini/Reuters via Imagn Images
Feb 19, 2026; Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy; Marc Kennedy of Canada, Ben Hebert of Canada and Brett Gallant of Canada in action during their match against Norway in a men's curling semifinal during the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games at Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium.
Welling, the World Curling president and owner of a golf course design firm, said he isn’t sure whether Rock League is the “perfect answer” to growing the sport, but he thinks modern methods could help shift the sport’s perception.
Welling wants to introduce people to curling through social media clips and other newer formats, rather than traditional processes, such as parents passing the game down. He pointed out that golf has produced viral moments from features like the PGA Tour WM Phoenix Open’s 16th hole, which allows fans to be rowdy and cheer. The National Golf Foundation reported in 2024 that 70 to 80 million people have “shed their negative views of golf” in the past 10 years.
Shuster is all-in on the vision.
“If (the) goal and the dream is to be a semi-mainstream professional sport,” Shuster said, “I don't think it happens with the traditional curling fan culture."