Growing up watching the Winter Olympics was an exciting experience for me and my family. We loved watching all of these skilled athletes compete for their country’s pride. One of the sports that my family loved to watch was curling.

We would gather on the couch to watch these talented Olympians curl. The Olympic commentators would sound like stereotypical football commentators, showing their enthusiasm for the spectacular sport. My dad would be explaining the rules trying to get me to focus, but I only cared about the colorfully topped stones floating across the sheet of ice. They looked magical. These memories might be through rose-tinted glasses, but it was a time when life was simple and I only had to care about the colored stones and not the points.

Mentioning points, you might be wondering what crazy sport I’m talking about. Here are the basics. Curling is a sport in which players slide chunks of smooth stone across a sheet of ice towards a target area, formed of concentric circles. Two teams, each consisting of four players, compete against each other, taking turns sliding the heavy, polished granite stones towards the target area, also known as the house. Each team has eight stones and the purpose of the game is to acquire the highest number of points by getting their stones as close to the center of the house as possible. For more information about the basics of curling, check out this video by Curling Canada.

Speaking of Curling Canada, it is one of the leading leagues on curling in the world. Its mission is to inspire Canadians to incorporate curling into their lives and to have fun with it. From this, you can probably tell that Canada is quite invested in curling, along with Australia, Denmark, Russia, Spain, Japan, Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries, and other European countries.

One country that we don’t tend to see on the lists of curling countries is the United States, as curling isn’t very popular outside of the northern states. However, it started to get more popular as the men’s U.S. Olympic Curling Team won the bronze medal at the 2006 Winter Olympics when curling officially became an Olympic sport. And after the men’s U.S. Olympic Curling Team won the gold medal in the 2018 Winter Olympics, the game’s popularity grew even more.

Now, there are 185 curling clubs across the United States, and about 23,500 curlers participating in these clubs, according to the United States Curling Association. Curling will only continue to grow in popularity over the next couple of years, so maybe you can join in on the action. And who knows? Maybe one day future generations will scream at their T.V., hoping for your success at the Winter Olympics.