USA Curling Has A Good Problem

If you’ve ever listened to Dean Gemmell talk about 5-and-Under curlers, you’ve probably heard him reference the high quantity of emails he receives from this growing demographic.

(As a reminder, these are adult curlers who have been curling for five or fewer years—these are not kindergartners filling up the USA Curling CEO’s inbox.)

While 5U curling in the USA has been around for some time, the sanctioned national championship itself is still quite young, and it’s going through some growing pains.

In the 23-24 season, there were 588 (non-unique) team entries in national championship qualifying events held across the U.S.

Getting into these events can be a challenge. Some events put pretty tight limits on the number of team entries. Other tournaments have gender and geographic limitations on who can enter. And even for a fully open event, it can be challenging to snag a team entry (I dug deeper into small and region-limited events on my Substack).

The penultimate open qualifying event in the 2023-24 season was hosted in March by the Denver Curling Club, and it didn’t open registration until January. The 24 spots filled in 13 minutes, leaving many good teams (and curlers) high and dry.

It seems some of those challenges are going to be worse for the upcoming season.

In August, USA Curling announced the 23 qualifying events for 2024-25. Even before qualifying events had been announced, events which had already opened registration had been filled. In all, 31 bonspiels had applied to be selected as a qualifying event, surely leaving some organizers disappointed to be left out.

It didn’t take long for curlers to voice their displeasure with some events not being selected. I’m sure even more curlers will be disappointed when they attempt to qualify for a bonspiel only to find out it is already full with a waiting list.

USA Curling is certainly looking at ways to improve the experience for everyone, but they’ve got a challenging road ahead. During a recent Town Hall meeting, Dean Gemmell mentioned goals of moving up the timeline of receiving host applications and publishing the list of qualifiers which will give clubs and competitors more time to plan. But he also noted to expect some year-over-year churn of which clubs are selected to host qualifiers as more clubs apply.

No doubt this will upset some regularly recurring qualifier hosts, but it will help get curlers to new clubs which, for me, was one of my favorite parts of the 5-and-Under qualifying journey.

The United States has an abundance of enthusiastic curlers, most of whom are in their 20s and 30s, wanting to get more involved in the sport.

They’re wanting to travel to new clubs, meet other curlers who started around the same time, and further develop their skills, and these curlers are not afraid to spend money on raffles and drinks while they do so.

Having a shortage of entry spots and leaving clubs out of the qualifier selection process is a challenge, to be sure, but it’s an awfully good problem to have.