Curling

Former captain, Washington U18 boys team, Granite Curling Club of Seattle.

The sponsorship

The best part of this story isn’t the curling. Junior teams don’t travel unless someone funds the travel, so I went and found the funding: I organized a $3,500 sponsorship from Opendoor to cover the team’s Pacific Northwest circuit.

That meant finding a sponsor who’d plausibly say yes, pitching them on what they’d get out of it rather than what we needed, and seeing it through to money actually in the account. It’s the same skill that later took Lakeside Robotics from $200 to $10,000 and funded a new robotics society in London. I learned an early version of it on a curling team.

On the sport itself

Curling is a game of committed decisions under a clock. The ice literally changes as a match goes on: it gets scratched up and steers the stones differently, so the plan you made twenty minutes ago quietly stops being the right one. Calling shots for the team (the role of the “skip”) is mostly about reading that drift correctly and being willing to change the call.

Footage

media/curling/

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