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Is there a future for small town curling?

Curling is one of the world’s oldest team sports. Canada has undoubtedly taken a keen interest in the sport, with world championships and Olympic gold medals to prove it. On a smaller and closer scale, curling is Saskatchewan’s provincial sport.
Tonkin Curling Club
The Tonkin Curling Club, shown here, is one small curling club that keeps on pushing through, regardless of having fewer curlers now than they had in the past.

Curling is one of the world’s oldest team sports. Canada has undoubtedly taken a keen interest in the sport, with world championships and Olympic gold medals to prove it.

On a smaller and closer scale, curling is Saskatchewan’s provincial sport.

But curling clubs in smaller communities aren’t seeing the same level of excitement that Canadians are showing the sport in bigger centers.

Danny Lamoureux is the director of curling club development & championship services with Curling Canada. He said that although curling on a larger scale has been getting more popular, they’ve been seeing problems in small town rinks that once used to thrive.

“What we’re seeing is the small clubs in communities of 1500 people or less are not doing so well,” said Lamoureux.

A local rink experiencing this is the Tonkin Curling Club.

Jeff Sherwin is the ice maker/care taker at the TCC. He said they still see their regulars every winter, but it’s not how it used to be at the club.

“At the grassroots level here, I know in the Yorkton area there’s probably half a dozen clubs within 50 miles, I know the numbers are down at all of those clubs,” said Sherwin.

Sherwin said in the past, they used to get 30 or more teams for the annual bonspiels they held. A few weeks ago, their ladies’ bonspiel saw ten teams in total, which was actually up from the year before. The men’s bonspiel this year had 20 teams.

“Unfortunately, people are so busy with kids and other activities that curling kind of gets put on the back burner,” said Sherwin.

Why?

Lamoureux explained that there are a few reasons why small town curling rinks are suffering.

He said a lot of those towns, especially here in the Prairies, actually have far less than 1500 people.

“There’s simply not enough population to support running the business,” he said. “The business of curling today is way more expensive in respect to where it was 30 years ago.”

Lamoureux said it’s impossible for a club with maybe 50 members to be supported the way it needs to be in order to survive, no matter how big the sport has gotten.

The cost of electricity in some places in Canada is one of the highest costs the Lamoureux said the clubs are facing.

He explained that curling rinks are not like hockey rinks in that they do not receive municipal funding from taxpayers. Curling rinks are member-driven. And since the cost of electricity is so high, the few members are just not able to bring in the money needed to thrive.

“When you go back to the ‘60s and ‘70s, the curling club was the meeting place for everybody,” said Lamoureux. “TV wasn’t what it is today, we didn’t have all these other things we could go and do. In the wintertime, it was cold. So you play hockey or go to the curling rink.”

Back then, Lamoureux said the curling rinks acted as a main food and beverage option in those towns, too.

At the Tonkin Curling Club, Sherwin said they also used to have junior curling when there were rural schools in the area, which led to more business for the club. But once those schools shut down, it ended the junior curling. Those kids now curl at clubs located closer to their schools – in bigger towns.

What can be done?

While Lamoureux said it’s a sad story and there’s not much they, at Curling Canada, can do to help, there are still moves that can be made by small town curling rinks to succeed.

One of these is to look for other organizations in similar predicaments.

“Look where dwindling population numbers seem to be affecting [organizations], and join together!” he said.

He mentioned the local figure skaters and the Lions Club as examples.

“Find someone else who can use your building for their own needs, and you get their revenue,” said Lamoureux.

Another option Lamoureux offered was to take the curling rocks and move into the local hockey rink for a while. It keeps the rocks cold, keeps the curling alive but reduces the costs of operating out of the curling rink.

The future of curling in Canada

Lamoureux expects the future of curling in Canada to be bright. With programs like Rocks and Rings, which introduces young students in schools to curling in gym class, and with more high schools bringing the sport into their regular gym curriculum, the correlation with club memberships has been evident.

“We’re getting a 5-25% pick-up, where the kids then go and have an on ice opportunity and they join the clubs,” said Lamoureux.

“It’s a generational change that’s going to happen for curling. In eight to ten years, we expect to see a significant jump of people who are going to be in our curling clubs,” said Lamoureux.

Sherwin said he has similar hopes - to see the Tonkin Curling Club get more of their business back in the future.

“Maybe it’s just the age group of everyone right now, with the age of their kids,” said Sherwin. “Maybe in five or six years, when those kids get older, maybe some of those people will come back.”

While the future of curling itself appears bright, the future of small town rinks might not be. But it’s not over for them yet, and it seems as though everyone is rooting for the underdogs. It’s just a matter of getting people back in those rinks.