Curling

Captain, Washington U18 boys team — Granite Curling Club of Seattle.

The sponsorship

The part of this I’d point a recruiter at 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 identifying a plausible sponsor, making the case in terms of what they’d get rather than what we needed, and following it through to money in an account. It’s the same skill that took Lakeside Robotics from $200 to $10,000 and funded a new robotics society in London — and I learned a version of it here.

On the sport itself

Curling is a game of committed decisions under a clock, where the ice changes underneath you over the course of a match and the plan you made two ends ago stops being the right one. Skipping a team is largely reading that drift correctly and being willing to change the call.