Silly sport for the day

Kevin Riordan has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about curling (no, not hair):

Never curled before? Frank Sharp has some advice for you: "Walk like a penguin" to keep your balance, he tells 32 curling newbies at the Igloo Ice Rink in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, where they are eager to get started. "If you fall, fall like a turtle. Protect your head."
Sharp and his wife, Jane, are launching the sport of curling (sometimes likened to shuffleboard, or chess, on ice) in South Jersey. The first game was in February of 2014 on Mimosa Lake near their Medford, New Jersey home; by the end of December of 2014, nearly two hundred adults and youngsters had attended Learn to Curl sessions at the Igloo, and more than fifty have joined the Jersey Pinelands Curling Club.
"Curling is a lot harder than it looks, but there's a really fast learning curve," says Jane, who began playing the game with her husband in Plainfield in Union County, in 2010. "Within a couple of hours, newcomers are curling with people they've never met before, and having a great time."
A competitive yet convivial team sport born on a frozen loch somewhere in sixteenth-century Scotland, curling involves sleek little stones, referred to as rocks. They look like designer teakettles, weigh more than forty pounds, and are typically made of the granite found on a Scottish island called Ailsa Craig.
Curling also involves all manner of lore and lingo (broomstacking is the term for a postgame cold beer, or two), as I find out during a Learn to Curl session the day after Christmas in 2014. "This is the biggest session we've had so far," Jane says, as the crowd of men and women, most of them young or in middle age, prepare for their first lesson.
Curling Club volunteers set up the ice, marking out the lanes between "hacks", from which the rocks are propelled, as well as the targets, called houses, in the ice.
People familiar with curling from watching it on television (it's been a Winter Olympics event since 1998) might be surprised by the distances traveled during the two-hour game, says Bridget O'Grady, 28, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Players rotate among the positions, including the all-important duo who "sweep" or "brush" the ice ahead of the moving rocks. "You have to deliver the rock and sweep the rock and stay with the rock" for more than a hundred and thirty feet, says O'Grady, the office manager at the Igloo and a Pinelands Curling Club member. The former figure skater says she "got hooked" the first time she played last summer.
Players don't skate but, rather, slide, walk, and run on the ice. Slip-on soles, called grippers, are available for those who don't have curling shoes. Swiffer-like brooms, delivery sticks, and stabilizers also are essential; zany leggings and other fun garb popular among some curlers are optional. Teams are made up of four members, playing the positions of lead, second, vice, and skip.
"I love the sport," says Sue Niedrach, a counselor at a Mercer County, New Jersey middle school who lives in Medford, New Jersey and grew up with curling in Schenectady, New York. "Getting a bit of exercise is a bonus, but I would say the strategy and social aspects are what make the game."
Jane wasn't kidding about the learning curve. After about an hour, actual curling is underway. And not for nothing is it traditionally called "the roaring game", particularly when five games are being played at once.
The Igloo resounds with the commands of the skips, who are like coaches, urging the broom-carrying duos to warm the ice and increase the speed of the stones: Sweep! Sweep! Sweep! Sweep! It's great, frenetic fun, even to someone whose last foray onto the ice was during elementary school, half a century ago.
"I loved being able to actually try it," says Nicolette Stoner (photo), twenty, of Mount Laurel, New Jersey, who fell in love with the game watching the Olympics and got a Learn to Curl gift certificate for Christmas. A senior at Stevenson University in Maryland, where she is majoring in business communications, Stoner plays soccer recreationally, but found curling to be physically and mentally demanding. "It's also difficult strategically," she adds, noting that teams have opportunities to knock an opposing team's rock out of position. But Stoner's team won, 4-3. "I was not the one who threw the stone," she says. "But I was the one to help brush it in."

Rico says it's a stretch to call it a sport, but people obviously love it.