Funding a Way

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

Our team had a bevy of problems (finances, transportation, recruitment), but one thing we never lacked was a desire to overcome them.

At our first intercollegiate curling match in Wayland, MA playing against MIT. Left to right: Marie, Kelsey (the club's founder and first President), me.

Some of what made that first campaign to the College Curling National Championship so difficult wasn't just that we were new (read: bad), but that we had lots of barriers in the way of doing what we were all there to do: curl. The team was doing its best to accommodate individual financial needs to keep competing, but we honestly just didn't have any money to do so. At least in the first couple of years, a few members of the leadership team were quietly putting their own money into covering these costs.

Very few of us had vehicles as well, and those who did were overburdened with having to drive people around every weekend to practice or bonspiels (the word used in curling for a tournament). We had a system set up for sharing gas money throughout the season that was (necessarily) incessantly precise about sharing costs based on mileages for cars and etc. It wasn't fun, but it was fair (in multiple senses of that word).

We needed to come up with a better cash flow for the club to ease everyone's anxieties about the finances and get us focused more on the task at hand: becoming better curlers. Because we didn't have a fundraising position on the board, all of us pitched in to take up this task at some point. As Vice President, I ended up taking a lot of this on because I saw it as integral to performing in my other functions in that capacity (such as recruitment and membership) as well as my leadership on the ice.

Over the next couple of years, we started to make some real headway in finances because of some Herculean effort from the board. Some things were minimal contributors - bake sales had low margins, an account with an engine that donates a percent of every purchase to the cause was minimally adopted (basically just by a few friends and family), and occasionally we found change in seat cushions around campus (only kidding a little). But a few things really solidified our situation. One was a Go Fund Me campaign run by our Treasurer, James. We planned a hike up a mountain nearby and asked people to donate to "fund" the effort. I thought it was crazy - who would just give us money for this silly little trip? Well, it turned out that I had not given our curling community the credit they deserved, and that James was a special kind of crazy. That trip, and the generosity of those who supported it, funded about a year and a half of the club's general operational expenses.

Picture of the team at the peak of Mount Misery as part of our fundraiser. It was obviously not that hard of a hike, given that we brought an old curling stone and our brooms with us to the top. Left to right: Allison, Chelsea, Joey, Tian Tian, me.

Around the same time, I had been actively working to submit entries to various contests and calls for submissions around the country, hoping to land a miracle. A couple worked out in short order that put our financial situation at ease and really solidified the status of the club. Oddly enough, it was my background in art (in which I minored in College) that got us started.

Near the end of our first run at Nationals, USA Curling had just finalized a television series on NBCSN called Curling Night in America. I had been put in contact with them about their interest in designing a logo for the event, and had jumped at the chance. Still in the process of self-teaching graphic design, I spent a ton of time agonizing over the little tricks of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to try to get the logo right. In the end, they were happy enough with the product to take it (you can see the logo in the ice and on Team USA's jackets in this video), but they didn't have cash to pay for it. It turned out that my team needed some gear, and that USA Curling had a ton lying around, so they provided the team's jackets that were worn in competition exclusively for the next two years (and then passed down to new members each season since).

The first Nationals squad, decked out with our jackets from USA Curling, at Nutmeg Curling Club in Bridgeport, CT. Left to right: Tian Tian, Allison, me, Yifei

The logo designed for Curling Night in America, 2015. Note: This is pulled from Twitter, so apologies for the blurry/saturated image - I swear it looked better than this on the ice.

That same year, I also did graphic design work as part of the annual logo design contest for College Nationals, and won. The prize each year was a team's worth of gear from Brooms Up Curling Supplies, and serendipitously we were also in desperate need of brooms for the team. As gear goes, brooms are the most important piece of shared equipment on college teams (compared with other essentials like stabilizers, stopwatches, and uniforms), so this was also a big help for our budding squad.

The logo designed for USA Curling College Nationals, 2015. Note: This is pulled from USA Curling's website, so apologies for the blurry image.

The following Fall, I submitted stories about our team to a contest with the company Zipcar, which provides hourly car rental services around the country. They were having a contest for college organizations called Students with Drive, which was run as an online voting system. We rallied our community around us, won our month, and were third in the grand prize round for the year, ultimately earning our club $6,000 in driving credit with the company. This supported us for about three seasons of going to bonspiels and practices, and was integral in our growth of the team, since it made it cheaper and easier for students to join the club and compete.

Through all of this success in fundraising, we were able to finally start focusing on getting better on the ice. We qualified for Nationals again that year in Chaska, MN, and went a respectable 2-3, just missing out on fourth place in our last game. We were no longer an 0-fer team, and the best was yet to come.

The team at Nationals in Chaska, MN in 2016. Left to right: Coach Ed, Chelsea, me, Tian Tian, Patrick, Allison, Michael.

Next week's installment will continue with stories of bonspiel fun.