CurlTi.me/Learn/Why start a club
Why start a club
A club here is a public page, a private roster and a small set of tools for keeping people in touch. It works for a real curling club that wants a simple home, and it works for eight friends who play on a Tuesday.
Last updated 2026-08-16
What a club actually is here#
Three things, and it is worth being clear about which is which because they have different audiences.
- A public page at
curlti.me/club/your-club— name, logo, where you are, how to reach you, what you have to say, and photographs. Anyone can read it; search engines index it. - A members-only side — the roster, and a board showing how the club's members did on today's challenge. Members see the names; the public sees a count.
- A small set of tools for the work of running the thing — invites, announcements, an events calendar, a weekly digest email, a printable QR poster, and an API for clubs that already have their own systems.
Who it is for#
The design is deliberately loose about this, because the same tools serve very different groups:
| If you are | What you get out of it |
|---|---|
| A real curling club | A page you can actually keep current, a roster that is not a spreadsheet on somebody's laptop, and a calendar members can subscribe to. Not a replacement for your website — a simpler thing that stays true. |
| A league or a bonspiel | One address to print on things, announcements that reach everyone, and a standings board that updates itself. |
| A workplace or school team | A page to point people at, a QR poster for a noticeboard, and a daily challenge board that gives people a reason to come back. |
| A group of friends | Somewhere for the eight of you to compare scores and argue. This is a perfectly good reason and needs no justification. |
The reasons that actually hold up#
One address that does not move#
Most small clubs communicate through whatever chat app the committee happened to be using in the year they formed, and the archive dies with the app. A club page is a permanent public address you can print on a poster, put in a local listing, and hand to somebody who asks where to curl around here. It will still be there when the group chat is not.
A reason to come back that is not a duty#
Every day there is one shared challenge — the same position for everybody in the world — and a club board showing who in your club has played it and how they did. It takes about ninety seconds.
This turns out to be the thing that keeps a club page alive. Announcements are read once. A board with your name low on it is read every day.
A roster that belongs to the club#
Rows on the roster can be bare names the club typed in, or they can be linked to a player who joined through an invite link. Both are fine, and a club can run entirely on typed names if that is what it has. The roster is the club's record rather than a directory of accounts, which means it does not go stale when somebody stops signing in.
A calendar people can actually subscribe to#
Club events publish as a standard calendar feed. A member subscribes once and the club's draws, bonspiels and social nights appear in their own calendar forever after — no app, no reminders to install anything, no dependence on anyone reading a post.
Ways in that do not need explaining#
- Invite links that add somebody to the roster and connect their account, mintable and revocable from the management screen.
- A printable QR poster with the invite embedded. Pin it to the noticeboard at the rink; people point a phone at it and they are in.
- A weekly digest email so members hear what happened without having to go and look.
And if you already have systems#
Clubs that run their own website, a members' database or a bot do not have to keep two things in step by hand. There is a documented API key that reads the club, the roster and the standings and can post announcements, plus webhooks that push events to you as they happen. See the club API.
What it is not#
Being straight about the limits saves everybody time:
- It is not a full club website. There is no page builder, no membership payments, no booking system. If you need those, keep your website and link to it.
- It is not a scheduling tool. Events publish and appear in calendars; they do not collect availability or build draws.
- It is not a mailing list. The digest goes to members who have accounts and have not turned it off, and that is the whole of it.
- It is not a source of data about your members. Nothing is sold, there is no advertising, and the analytics record the game rather than the person — no IP address, no user agent, no referrer. See privacy.
What it asks of you#
Honestly: one person with an account, ten minutes to apply, and then as much or as little as you want. A club with a logo, a description and nothing else is a perfectly good club page. Everything past that is optional.
The one real commitment is the address. A club's slug —
curlti.me/club/this-part — never changes after approval,
because it ends up printed on posters and pasted into messages. Choose it as
carefully as you would a domain name.
Applying needs a signed-in account, and the person who applies becomes the club's president when it is approved. That is deliberate: a club's president must never be an anonymous browser cookie that clears itself away one afternoon and takes the club with it.