The 100 Mile House Curling Club has had registration open since Sep. 27, and there have been mixed results in terms of how many people have joined.
The women’s league has jumped from eight to 12 teams, while the men’s has gone from eight to seven. The new mixed league has eight teams.
Gordon Smith, the president of the club, said attracting young people to the club is something they have to press on with.
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In total, the club has had 96 members join for the 2018-19 curling season, which is 14 more than the previous year.
“We try to keep the numbers the same (at least). We always want to grow,” said Maria Hamilton, the club’s treasurer. “We definitely exceeded our expectation.”
Hamilton went on to say the club will be targeting youth to keep the current numbers for the 2019/20 season.
There are currently 19 junior curlers in the Youth League and an additional four junior curlers playing in an adult league.
“We are also trying to encourage more 18-54-year-olds to come out. We track out average age and for two years in a row our average has gone down (even though we are all getting older), so we are very happy about that,” said Hamilton.
The Men’s League losing a team doesn’t seem to be much of a concern, as the team that left is still part of the club. The skipper of the team decided he would rather play in mixed with his family, so he moved to that league and opted not to curl in the men’s league. The remaining members of the team filled in the empty slots on other teams.
The Doubles League is new this year and has eight teams registered.
“The league was started because of John Morris and Caitlyn Laws playing in the [2018] Olympics. Many curlers watched them win gold,” said Hamilton. “Late last year, we had a one day ‘Try Doubles Curling’ and it was very successful, so we thought we would try to put a league together.”
The new league only plays 10 times per year (twice a month). Hamilton said that everyone that she has talked to about it finds it really enjoyable. She also described it as fast-paced and not a lot of rest.
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