[MUSIC PLAYING]
My relationship with curling actually started in 2002.
I was five years old.
I woke up, turned on the TV one morning,
and I just saw this weird game with people pushing stones
down a sheet of ice, and there's a target,
and I had no idea what was happening.
But I was just so mesmerized with the game.
I definitely didn't understand it when I had watched it.
I just saw people sweeping, people yelling.
Didn't really understand what was going on.
But I did like to watch, and especially the Olympics.
I've seen curling on TV.
It looks like such a weird sport,
because people are just sweeping ice,
and I wanted to try it once.
And the curling team said, just come out.
Learn to curl.
So I got into it through that.
MIT curling is a club sport.
We're made up of a mix of undergrads and grad students,
and even a few family and other affiliates at MIT.
We have a dual focus of teaching people about the game
and how to play, but also of competing
in competitive tournaments with other colleges
around the country.
Almost everyone on the MIT curling team learned at MIT.
Just thought this might be a fun activity to pick up,
and they get to go and curl at a national level.
It's pretty impressive.
Each team has four players and, at any given time,
one person is throwing, two people are sweeping,
and one person is down at the other end calling the shot,
telling them where to throw, and telling
the sweepers what to do as, like,
a fine adjustment to the shot.
That person's called the skip.
Then when they have to throw, one person goes down,
and that person's the vice.
So they are collaborating on strategies.
You alternate between teams with who's throwing stones.
You always throw it in the same order.
You have eight rocks.
One team throws its rock down.
It stops.
Another team throws its rock down.
It stops.
And you keep going until all 16 rocks are thrown.
The colored stone closest to the center is one point,
and then you get one additional point for every similar colored
rock closest to the center.
Curling is a sport that you can come and just learn it,
and we're happy to have people come once
and get introduced to the sport.
If you fall in love-- like pretty much everyone
on the team does--
and you come back for more.
There's a lot of science behind curling,
including some that's actually not-so-well-understood.
The stone curls in the same direction that you turn it.
When you slide out, you actually put a handle on the stone,
and so you turn it either clockwise or counterclockwise.
Normally, if you did that on ice with anything other
than a curling stone, the object would
start spinning and curling away from the direction
that you curled it in.
But curling stones actually curl the same way.
It has something to do with the friction
of the stone on the ice, and sweeping may melt the ice,
it may scratch the ice, and it somehow affects the curl.
But there's a lot of ongoing research into that,
and we actually don't know what is going on.
One of the most popular theories is
that as that rock is gliding down and sort of making
that thin layer of water at the front,
by the time it gets to the back, it's a little bit frozen,
and that's how the friction is getting to the back.
There's also a theory that there are little grooves in the ice,
especially that you put in from sweeping,
that will make a stone go in one direction or the other.
And MIT likes to use directional sweeping,
so I don't think that theory is completely bogus.
Each stone is about 42 to 44 pounds,
and the granite comes from one island in Scotland.
There are two different quarries.
One quarry does the granite for the top
and the bottom part of the rock, and then the other quarry
does the middle part of the rock--
the actual part that will collide into other stones.
Curling draws a certain person-- so
someone who's interested in why is it curling?
Or this is a very strange sport.
And I think it works at MIT because of that curiosity,
and this is an interesting thing.
I want to learn about it.
I want to try it.
Honestly, for a lot of people, it's a bucket list item.
And I think everyone should try it once,
if not only to say that they can do it,
but also so they can respect the sport.
You might fall in love, and at the very least knock something
off the bucket list, right?