Bonspiels and Silly Pants

This post is the third in a series of posts about the sport of curling.

If there's one thing that curling is known for, it's the pants.

Early on in the club's existence, we discovered the trend of wearing outrageous pants while competing, started by the Norwegian men's team. Similar to golf, these pants are often loud and fun, and are a way to keep it light during intense competition. In fact, most curlers in the US who don silly pants like these buy them from the Loudmouth Golf company.

The Norwegian men's squad commonly credited with starting the trend of wearing outlandish pants while competing.

Curling has a lot of silly traditions that far pre-date the pants as well, as might be expected of a sport that originated as a drinking sport on outdoor lakes, wiping frost off the surface with corn brooms. Most of those traditions involve drinking, though, and college curling has strict rules about alcohol (effectively a zero tolerance policy). So, we latched on to things like broomstacking (hanging out chatting, eating, and playing games like crokinole after a match), wearing silly pants, and trading club pins.

Crokinole, a game that has rules very similar to curling, where players flick wooden disks toward a center target.

These traditions have a way of setting the tone for a club, and ours was a ton(e) of fun. From the beginning, our President, Kelsey, made it a point to have our yearly college bonspiel (pronounced bahn-shpeel; tournament) be one of merriment, costume contests, door prizes, off-ice games, and just plain fun. In that spirit, I debuted the first silly pants at the first college bonspiel we hosted, and they sparked a trend throughout our team and college curling more broadly in the East. I won't take all the credit - the curling community at large was already doing this a bit. But certainly, in the nascent college curling circuit, I was at the least one of the very first, and became the most consistent.

Debut of "the pants" at the first spiel.

Bonspiels were always so much fun because college students have so much energy. They can curl at 8am, study for an hour after the game, eat lunch, go back out for another game at 1pm, come back in and take a quick nap, study some more, have dinner, and then go back out and curl at 6pm. And they would do this all weekend. Inevitably, most students would get minimal studying done and would instead hang out having a laugh, playing games, and just getting to know one another.

Spiels (as most curlers affectionately call them) are often themed, and include costume contests, trivia, games, and etc. following that theme. The first spiel we hosted was over the weekend of the Super Bowl, so we dubbed it the "Super Spiel", encouraging everyone to come with their best superhero costumes. Trivia was about Marvel and DC movies and comics, door prizes all included "super" in their name (like super ball, or super glue), and the party favors and decorations were all themed. This event started the history of our spiel being among those that other schools most looked forward to attending every year.

The team in our costumes at the first spiel our club hosted. We (justly) did not win the costume contest.

Our second spiel was called "Blazing Handles", after the cult classic Blazing Saddles. Trivia was about the movie, there were themed dishes like chili and jerky, and everyone was asked to wear their best chaps and boots.

The flyer for the second spiel, which I designed.

The winners of the costume contest (more for their antics than anything), Elana and Cody from Penn. Building off of that success, they went on to win the College Curling National Championship one year later.

The team at the second spiel. Left to right: Dennis, Michael, Tian Tian, Allison, me, Chelsea, Fabian, Patrick.

Curlers from MIT, Yale, and RIT playing the game Loopin' Louie, a staple of broomstacking fun, as part of a tournament for the game during our spiel.

Some of my best memories of those early years are working in people's apartments on the party favors, coming up with funny team names, and hanging out with friends from all over the East Coast who would gather 6 or 7 weekends a year to compete. Through those interactions, I've made lifelong friends and memories that I cherish.

Behind the scenes of all this fun, my teammates and I were slowly getting better and starting to win games. We were hitting the gym weekly, spending Sundays practicing, playing in leagues multiple nights a week, and putting in the work to become a truly competitive team. And once we hit the third season, that finally started to become reality.

Next week's installment will continue with stories of finding success at the National level.