A chilly February day in Jacksonville is even colder inside the Veterans Memorial Arena downtown because its floor is covered in ice.
The National curling championship has been taking place in Jacksonville all week. On Wednesday, WJCT sports analyst Cole Pepper took a first-hand look at the Olympic sport.
In curling, a player pushes a big stone down the ice. It looks kind of like shuffleboard, and other teammates with brooms are involved.
Before Cole headed into the arena, he said he’s a sports guy, but mostly “stick-and-ball sports,” like basketball, football, soccer, baseball, golf and tennis.
He says, “I think there’s this thing about curling that people watch it and go, ‘There’s no way I could be on the U.S. hockey team in the winter Olympics, but maybe, you feel like maybe you could be good enough.”
Good enough to be an Olympian curler.
On the ice, Cole meets Olympic hopeful Brady Clark, who's in Jacksonville competing with “Team Clark” from Seattle.
He says even curlers who compete at his level still have to maintain some sort of job.
“I have a full-time job at an insurance company: special projects leader,” he says. “Luckily I have six weeks of time off, and... I’ve been logging on, getting some work done.”
Clark says the people with the brooms need to be fit, and they’re normally in their 20’s, maybe 30’s. Clark’s position, the skip, has to be able to analyze the plays. He says skips can compete into their 40’s.
Cole asks Clark if a good golfer might be a good skip. Clark says, actually, yes.
“We have several golf pros at our club, and they read the ice amazingly well,” Clark says. “Their mind just reads it just like reading the green.”
But could Cole Pepper become an Olympic curler? Clark says it might be a more realistic goal than becoming an Olympic alpine skiier, but it’s not as easy as it looks.
“We’ve had some people that are retired already in their 40s, late 30s and they’ve said, ‘I’m going to go to the next Olympics,’ and they come and train, and I’ve never seen them make it to the Olympics,” he says.
But Cole was feeling confident, and he gave it a try. The goal is to get the stone as close as possible to the center "house," or markings that look like a bullseye on the ice. In a real match, teams are competing against each other, so there’s strategy involved in navigating the stones around each other. Cole’s lone stone stopped pretty darn close to the middle.
He walked away a little out of breath, but still confident.
“I think maybe there’s a chance that I might be the great Southern hope for curling,” he says.
The next step?
“Well, Brady said that beers afterwards happen quite a bit, and, I mean, after throwing four stones there, I feel like I’ve probably earned it,” Cole says.
The U.S. Curling Nationals wrap up on Saturday.
WJCT Sports Analyst Cole Pepper appears every Monday on "First Coast Connect." Pepper also serves as the "Voice of the Armada" soccer team on television and radio and handles play-by-play duties on all Armada FC television broadcasts.
