Duluth Superior Magazine / February 2012 / Curling

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Curling

Kristy Filippini is a local band teacher and enthusiastic recent convert to the sport of curling, even though she herself thinks she’s got no business sliding around on ice.

“I went in knowing that I am a klutz, and would most likely fall,” she says.

While she did indeed fall, still falls, and will surely fall in the future, she still goes back time and again to that unique world of brooms and rocks for more. Curling’s an odd sport to peg – it seems to be a sort of amalgam of hockey and shuffleboard at first glance — but take any time to watch it played, and you begin to regard it as a precise game of millimeters, a game in which strategy is just as important as the athleticism that one might not think is necessary until one plays the game and feels the sore muscles that a first-time sweeper might feel after trying it out. For Filippini, she got into it fairly accidentally.

“I started curling in 2010,” she says. “One of my co-workers is married to a 2006 bronze medalist — they met while curling — and she got another co-worker to try it two years ago. They convinced me to attend the ‘Learn to Curl’ night.”

Dick Wicklund, the General Manager of the Duluth Curling Club, says that many people end up with an interest in the sport when the Winter Olympics are in the media.

“We end up with a larger interest during and after an Olympic year,” he says.

This isn’t to say that things are settling down at the club, or that they’re having trouble paying the rent. The way Wicklund explains it, the sport has the same kind of addictive qualities that keep golfers coming back to the links year after year, and so its popularity is always strong even without an Olympic-assisted extra boost in visibility.

For Filippini, her weekly winter curling sessions have become a big part of her life. You get the sense that, for her, it’s the physical challenge and the opportunity for socializing with like-minded people that suits her.

“Before curling,” the former UMD student says, “I knew the Curling Club as a place to meet up during intermissions for hockey games. Sometimes people would be curling those nights, and I remember trying to figure out what they were doing. Of course, I see it different now. Curling is a social sport — you meet up beforehand, have a drink or start up a conversation with a group of people. Once you’re done curling, the losing team typically treats the winning team to a drink. You sit at the same table with the opposing team and get to know each other.”

Filippini takes care to note her team’s 4-15 record in 2010, one that unfortunately meant that the drinks were on her and her teammates, most of the time.
The confessed “klutz” is making progress, though, and you can tell the game has become something of a mild obsession for Filippini. Maybe she’ll eventually be the beneficiary of some free drinks, herself. “Last year it took me nine weeks to not fall while throwing my rocks,” she says. “The first time I didn’t fall was amazing, because we had also won our first match. This year, I fell for the first time after nine weeks. I have noticed that I can glide on the ice longer in a lunge, and my rocks almost go where my skip wants them to go. I also notice that I can help give some ideas on what our next move should be.”

Given that the Duluth Curling Club closes at the end of March, it may be too late to get involved in league play in the way Kristy Filippini is, but Dick Wicklund says that anyone with an interest in the sport can still come by to see what it’s all about, at least.

“People are welcome to come in and see what goes on and gather information about the club,” he says. The club’s website (www.duluthcurlingclub.org) is also chock full of information for the curious.

Filippini’s parting advice to those interested parties? “Give it a try, but go in knowing that you will most likely fall your first time. Just get back up and try it again.”