Sports Illustrated on curling

It's always nice when the Big Boys take notice of the roaring game and that's especially so in the United States. Sports Illustrated turned its eye to curling and produced a nice article showing just how fast the game is growing south of the border. According to Rick Patzke, top dog at USA Curling, there's been an 18 per cent growth in participation and 15 new clubs in the last year. Now that's great and all, but the overall numbers are still pretty small.

"That's very pertinent,'' Patzke said. "I think we're still somewhat of an insignificant sport with 16,500 members. If we get to 100,000 maybe we can start using the word of being a little bit more significant. A lot of people are discovering it for the first time.''

And US Olympic coach Phil Drobnick says there's still a lot of work to be done to make the game bigger in America.

"It's great to see that people are starting to understand our sport and they're wanting to come out and try it and see what it's like,'' Drobnick said. "We have to figure out a way to extend that across the country. That's going to be the next task. We have the excitement on the West Coast, we have the excitement on the East Coast, we have all these new clubs popping up, but now we have to figure out how not to grow the game but to grow the talent in those areas. That is going to be our biggest hurdle.''

You can read the full article here.