BROOMFIELD, Colo.—Craig Brown despised curling growing up, too tedious for his taste.
His older sister, Erika, though, was a curling connoisseur, traveling all around the world, making an assortment of international friends through the sport.
He watched his sister’s exploits with increasing awe, began to envy her burgeoning resume, and soon had a change of heart.
Family lured him into curling.
It’s hardly a surprise.
There’s a close kinship that exists among curlers as flocks of families take to the ice to roll the rock.
That’s quite evident at this year’s U.S. Olympic trials, where there are six sets of brothers in the competition, along with two sets of sisters, two clusters of cousins and three groups of siblings, including the Browns.
There also are two husbands on teams who have wives in the field, not to mention a mother and daughter tandem.
Family ties definitely run deep.
“Curling is very much something where your dad or mom takes you down to the club, and you play with them,” said Allison Pottinger of Team McCormick, whose husband, Doug, competes for Team Romaniuk. “It’s just one of those things—you don’t plan on it but the sport sort of sticks.”
Steve Brown never pushed his two kids, Craig and Erika, into curling.
He bribed them.
“Told them we’d stop at McDonald’s on the way home from the curling club,” the father said, laughing. “I just tried to make it fun, even if it meant playing with chairs and building forts when we were at the curling club.”
Erika Brown was a natural, earning a spot on the 1988 Olympic team as a 15-year-old when it was a demonstration sport in Calgary. She garnered another spot on the Olympic squad in 1998, the team finishing fifth in Nagano.
Now, she’s back again at the trials hoping to secure another spot, her father serving as coach.
“Curling is what we talk about at the dinner table,” said Erika Brown, whose husband, Ian Tetley, is a three-time world champion from Canada. “It’s great. You have the opportunity to play a team sport with people who you develop really close relationships with, and have an opportunity to travel all over the world. That’s what drew me.”
Watching his sister travel all over was what finally thawed Craig Brown on curling. Until then, he was a soccer and baseball enthusiast.
Then, accompanying his family to the 1989 junior world championships in Canada, he watched as his sister networked the room, talking to curlers from Sweden and Switzerland.
“I thought that was pretty cool,” said Brown, who’s from Madison, Wis.
On the drive home from the championships, Craig Brown told his father he’d be at worlds one day.
“I was like, ‘How in the heck are you going to worlds when you don’t even curl?'” his father said. “But that’s when he started.”
Craig Brown, 33, is now a two-time U.S. national champion and the skip of his own squad, Team Brown.
“He worked hard, dedicated himself,” his father said. “We just tried to be supportive.”
That was Sharon Vukich’s plan with her daughter, Emily Good.
Don’t push, just be there.
Not that she had to worry.
These two are connected by curling, arriving at the trials as part of Team Clark.
“It’s fun to compete together,” said Vukich, whose team was recently eliminated from the round-robin tournament, failing to advance to the next round.
Vukich’s father, Kearney Kozai, started the family’s obsession. Raised on the island of Oahu, he was introduced to curling soon after arriving in the Pacific Northwest, fascinated by a sport set on ice that combines elements of chess, shuffleboard and bowling.
Kozai was one of the founders of the Granite Curling Club in Seattle. His wife, Betty, is still a fantastic player at the age of 80, curling three times a week.
“How many sports can you play with your grandparents?” the 25-year-old Good said. “We’re a curling family. It’s such a wonderful sport.”
Pottinger met her husband through curling. He walked up to her at a world championships event and simply said, “Hey.”
“Believe it or not, it worked. ‘Hey’ can work,” Pottinger said, smiling.
The couple from Eden Prairie, Minn., balances their lives around jobs, practices and raising two young kids. It’s a hectic schedule only a fellow curler would understand and tolerate.
“I’ll leave for the curling club at 10 p.m., and he’s very understanding,” Pottinger said.
They try to curtail their curling chats, but it never works.
“We start out not talking about curling, but it sort of always loops back to curling,” Pottinger said.
Such is life for a curling family.
