ARENA CURLING

While many curling clubs play on ice dedicated for curling, there are many — including the Mower County Curling Club — who share ice with hockey players, figure skaters, and public skaters. By renting ice time (in our case, from the Packer Arena) we’re able to start our club and curl without having to raise the thousands of dollars necessary to build and maintain a dedicated curling arena.

While our volunteers do a great job of prepping the ice before each session, the major challenge in arena curling is ice quality. Since the ice is shared with skaters and is maintained by Zambonis, it can be difficult to have a perfectly flat sheet of ice. Sometimes you just have to “play the ice” and work with how the rocks are (mis)behaving on your sheet that particular day.

And since we’re sharing the ice with skaters, before we curl we need to bring out our rocks from storage and prep the ice — sweeping, pebbling, and installing the hacks — and afterwards, of course, return everything back to storage when we’re done. As a member, we appreciate your willingness to help out during setup and cleaning!

While we dream of having our own dedicated curling facility one day, for now we’re just happy to be curling in Austin, MN!