Your first time on the ice
Everything nobody tells you about turning up to a curling club having never done it. Which is, mostly, that you need clean shoes and nothing else.
Last updated 2026-08-18
Finding a session#
What you want is a learn-to-curl: a two-hour introduction with equipment provided and somebody teaching. Essentially every club runs them, and they are the front door to the sport for almost everyone in it.
Search for "learn to curl" plus your nearest city, or start from your national association's club finder — every one of them is listed on where to curl. Sessions cluster at the start of the season, around September and October in the northern hemisphere, and in the weeks after an Olympics, when clubs are braced for it.
You do not need a group. You do not need to know anybody. Turning up alone is entirely normal.
What to wear and bring#
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Clean trainers | Flat-soled, and not worn outside on the way in. Grit is the enemy of ice, and this is the only piece of kit you genuinely must get right. |
| Loose trousers | You are going to crouch a long way down. Jeans are the classic mistake. |
| Layers | A curling rink is around 4–8 °C — cold, but you will warm up fast. A fleece you can take off beats a coat you cannot. |
| Gloves | Optional but pleasant. Any gloves. You will be touching ice. |
| Nothing else | Stones, brushes, sliders and grippers are all provided at a learn-to-curl. Buying equipment before your first session is buying equipment before knowing if you like it. |
Clean shoes, not worn outside. Grit tracked onto curling ice ruins it — a single piece of dirt in the wrong place deflects a stone, which is what curlers mean by a "pick". Carry your trainers in and change at the rink. Nobody will be annoyed with you for anything else you get wrong.
Arriving#
Get there fifteen minutes early. Before you go on the ice you will be given two things:
- A gripper — a rubber sole that stretches over one shoe, so that foot has grip.
- A slider — a slippery sole for the other foot, sometimes already built into a lent shoe. This is the foot you slide on.
One foot grips and one foot slides. That asymmetry is the single most disorienting thing about a first visit to a rink, and it is worth knowing about before you feel it. Walk carefully until it stops being strange, which takes about five minutes.
The first ten minutes on the ice#
Nobody starts by throwing. The first thing taught is how to move: how to walk with one slippery foot, how to get down into the hack, how to push out of it.
You will almost certainly be given a stabiliser — a small frame, a bit like a walking aid, that you hold in your free hand. It makes balancing trivial and it is not cheating. Plenty of curlers use one permanently and plenty of clubs teach on them by default.
Then the slide. Being honest about this: the first time you push out of the hack it feels precarious and slightly alarming, and you will be much slower and much more upright than the people on television. That is what it is supposed to feel like. Anybody telling you curling is effortless has forgotten their first hour. The mechanics of what you are being asked to do are on the delivery, and reading it beforehand makes the session about twice as useful.
Throwing, and then playing#
You will throw a lot of stones with somebody correcting your line, and you will learn that weight — how hard to throw — is much harder than aim. That is universal and it never entirely stops being true.
Then most sessions finish with a short game, which is the part that decides whether you come back. Playing an end teaches you three things a drill cannot:
- Sweeping is exhausting. It is by some distance the hardest physical work in curling and you will find this out about six seconds in.
- The skip is shouting instructions at you and they are not angry. See the glossary — "hurry hard" means sweep harder, "never" means stop.
- It is a team game. Your bad shot gets rescued by two people with brushes, and the shot after it is somebody else's problem.
What it costs#
Less than people expect, in a way that is worth stating plainly because cost is a reason people never try.
- A learn-to-curl session is typically about the price of a cinema ticket, equipment included.
- A season's club membership is commonly less than a month at a commercial gym, and buys a weekly game for six or seven months.
- Equipment can wait indefinitely. Clubs lend brushes and sliders. When you do buy, a brush and a pair of shoes is the whole list — see the equipment page.
The reason it is cheap is structural: the ice is shared between dozens of players a night, and the expensive item — the stones — lasts fifty to seventy years and was probably bought by somebody's grandparents.
The things people are actually worried about#
“I will fall over”#
You might. Curling falls are almost always slow, low and undignified rather than dangerous — you are already crouched. Use the stabiliser, take the slide gently, and be aware that a wet knee is the usual worst outcome.
“I am not fit enough”#
Delivery is a balance and control skill rather than a strength one. Sweeping is genuinely hard work, but you can sweep as hard as you feel like, and nobody at a learn-to-curl expects anything. It is worth knowing that curling is a sport of accumulated load rather than sudden injury: the published survey found most competitive curlers report some knee, back or shoulder soreness over time, which is an argument for warming up, not for staying home.
“I am too old”#
Curling is close to unique in having teenagers and people in their eighties in the same league, playing each other, competitively. If the crouch is the problem, the delivery stick lets you throw standing up and is welcome in club play.
“I do not know the rules”#
Nobody expects you to. If you want the twenty minutes of preparation that makes the most difference, read how curling works and skim the glossary. Everything else you will absorb by playing.
Afterwards#
Stay for a drink. This is not a throwaway suggestion — the hour after the game is a real institution in curling, it has a name (broomstacking), and it is where you find out which league would take a beginner. Most clubs have one, and most clubs are shorter of players than they will admit on their website.
If you enjoyed it and want to keep the feel of it between sessions, the game on this site runs the same physics — the weights, the ice speeds and the sweeping are calibrated against published measurements rather than tuned by feel — so practising your weight here is not entirely a fiction.
Find a club near you Play a game first
Sources#
- Self-reported injury patterns among competitive curlers in the United States British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2004For the claim about accumulated soreness rather than acute injury — 79% report curling-related musculoskeletal pain, mostly knee, back and shoulder.
- Intro to curling USA CurlingA governing body’s own beginner guidance, useful for cross-checking what a session involves.