Curling Craze

With the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan featuring Curling, with the USA Men’s Curling Team taking the silver in the event, A Seattle-based Curling Club is seeing an increase with people inspired to get out on the ice and start sweeping.

The Granite Curling Club, the fourth largest Curling Club in America, established in 1961, has dedicated its entire facility to sport. Cheyrl Crandell, who runs group events at the club, says she expects a large increase in membership due to the Winter Olympics. She said a hundred new members joined after the 2022 Olympics that took place in Beijing, China.

Liz Greenland, a member who joined last fall to try something new and to meet new people, enjoys the unconventional support due to its obscurity in America, “it’s just really fun to do something that’s not typical,” She said, “A lot of my friends didn’t know what curling was.”

Greenland compares the sport to a mix of backgammon and bocce, while also saying it’s like “chess on ice.” Another thing she enjoys about sports is the is all-ages nature of the sport, with members ranging from twenty to even 80 years old, all shuffling, sweeping, and pushing the granite stone against the ice.

Cheyrl Crandell says this is just the beginning of the “Olympic bubble,” with the gym seeing a threefold increase in the club’s events, including “learn to curls,” and tri curling events.