A year ago, Syracuse junior Paul Mokotoff attended a curling tournament, also known as a bonspiel, at the Utica Curling Club. At the time, Syracuse didn’t have a curling team. Mokotoff had to pull together enough interested students, secure a location to practice and find opportunities for competition.

SU sociology professor Rebecca Schewe and Mokotoff created the SU curling club about a year ago, coordinating with Recreation Services and officially establishing the team on April 4, 2018. The team currently has eight members, but Mokotoff, now the club president, hopes that their success this season can be used as a recruiting tool.

“We do not hold tryouts,” Shewe said. “As a new club, we welcome all members. We have a few members who have curled previously but most are brand new.”

Curling is a sport that combines hockey, darts, and shuffleboard. Players slide stones towards a target area that is segmented into four concentric circles on a sheet of ice that is somewhat different from ice for hockey or figure skating. Two teams of four take turns sliding heavy, polished granite stones, also called rocks, across the ice curling sheet towards a circular target on the ice called the house.

As the rock slides across the ice, two players sweep the ice ahead of the rock to increase its distance. Each team has eight stones, with each player throwing two. The goal is to accumulate the highest score for a game; points are scored for the stones resting closest to the center of the house at the conclusion of each end, which is completed when both teams have thrown all of their stones. A game usually consists of eight or ten rounds.

Shewe learned to curl what she was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. She has been a member at the Madison Curling Club, the Dunedin Curling Club in New Zealand, the Kalamazoo Curling Club and now the Utica Curling Club.

The team is affiliated with the Utica Curling Club and the United States Curling Association. After just one year, the team qualified for the National College Curling Championship on March 8-10 against Broomstones Curling Club.

The team plays in head-to-head matches against others schools and works on various skills. Helping the newer curlers hone their skills in delivering and sweeping is especially important now that they are headed to the National Championships soon.

“The more experienced players and newbies are both working on their different throwing weights (speeds),” Mokotoff said, “which will help us get a better sense of the required weight (speed) a stone needs to be thrown for certain types of shots during a game.”

Published on April 22, 2019 at 11:57 am

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