Fight the pandemic, noisy curling club

Brian Hufe is a founding member and current president of the Diamond State Curling Club, the only curling facility in the state of Delaware.

“We’re currently celebrating our fifth year,” said Hufe. “My role before becoming president, and a role I’ve held onto, is fundraising and … swag.”

President Hufe is, in fact, the designer of the latest curling swag item, a “Skip Shirt” meant to be worn by frustrated curling bosses who are sick and tired of yelling commands down the ice to their teammates.

Or perhaps this, for some, will be a revenge gift from said teammates to their skip, who refuses to clearly signal the shot to come?

The shirt idea first came to Hufe before the pandemic struck.

“I was at a Five-And-Under bonspiel in 2019, the Cool Duck at Ardsley Curling Club, and a friend from another club was skipping but had lost his voice,” said Hufe. “I mentioned the shirt as more of a joke than anything.

Many curling teams—recreational or “professional”—create a system of hand signals to avoid screaming commands inside a noisy, cavernous ice rink. The Skip Shirt illustrates various weight terminology, such as “Normal,” Control,” and “Hack” in assigned shirt locations.

“I was already using hand signals for takeout weight calls—either tapping my wrist, my elbow, or shoulder as shown on the shirt—but calling anything else but tee-line weight didn’t seem to have a good signal,” said Hufe. “That or there were too many signals to remember.”

Diamond State has a vaccination requirement, and the club doesn’t require everyone to wear masks, but some still choose to.

“I noticed just how hard it was for me to hear people who wear masks in our arena,” said Hufe. “Their voices were muffled by the fabric and there was a lack of any ability to fill in the blanks with lip reading or anything like that, so I started thinking about the shirt again.”

Hufe was set to play in the Harvest Bonspiel at Philadelphia Curling Club this past weekend. Since Philly has a mask requirement in their facility including on the ice, he decided he would finally design the shirt and upload it to the Diamond State CC web store before heading to Pennsylvania.

Within a day or so, his club had earned $171 in Skip Shirt sales. That’s right—Hufe isn’t pocketing any profits from his creation; it’s a fundraiser for Diamond State.

Then, Korey Dropkin retweeted a post about the shirt. As Hufe watched Dropkin compete at the U.S. Trials between his bonspiel games, online Skip Shirt sales crept up to $290.

“The shirt wasn’t too difficult to design,” said Hufe. “A while back I taught myself some vector graphics skills using the free program Inkscape. I already know CAD and there’s some similarities.

“I would encourage clubs to look into these print-on-demand websites for some of their merchandise sales. They’re more expensive for certain things, so if there’s anything that you know you’ll bulk order you should definitely shop locally for print shops.

“But since you don’t have to carry any inventory with these sites, any silly idea can be uploaded and sold if people like it. If nobody buys it, all that you wasted was your time.”