By Jim Force
In baseball, you have groundskeepers who make sure the grass and infield dirt are perfectly smooth. In golf, the greenskeeper is responsible for a flawless putting surface. And in curling, it’s the ice crew who create and maintain the frozen rink where curlers slide their rocks toward the target.
At the Wausau Curling Center the last few weeks, the local ice crew of Pete Susens, Dale Genrich, Roger Luce and Matt Lane—assisted by a slew of volunteers—have been working day and night to get the facility ready for the opening of curling this season—Learn to Curl sessions for the public which start on Oct. 13. League play starts Oct. 20.
The crew started a few weeks ago with the curling center’s 18,000-square-foot concrete floor, which is cooled to 22 degrees by refrigeration system. Then, assisted by volunteers from the local curling club, they started spreading water over the surface—a mist at first, then thin floods of about 1,000 gallons each. The water is city water, treated by an on-site reverse osmosis system.
After repeated flooding, misting and freezing, the ice surface is painted white and marked, then iced over again. In all, the Wausau curling center holds eight “sheets” of ice, or lanes, with games being played on each. It’s one of a few in the United States that can accommodate eight games at once.
The markings are precise. The bullseyes at the ends—called the “house”—are comprised of circles cut into the ice with routers, then painted. Curling clubs color their houses differently, but Wausau is using a blue-green-white color scheme for the circles. The circle in the center—called the “button”—contains a decal, either the club logo or the logo of a local advertiser. Decals of the local high schools having curling teams are also frozen into the ice.
The long lines running the length of each sheet are actually colored yarn, stretched tight over tick marks and then misted over.
When all the markings are done, the surface of the ice is scraped and “pebbled,” a process of sprinkling water droplets over the surface. The droplets freeze instantly, creating a textured pattern on the ice that enables the rocks to “curl” left or right as they travel down the ice. The pebbling also makes the ice less slippery and easier for the players to walk on.
Having built up the ice sheets over several weeks, the ice crew isn’t finished. Early each morning, you’ll find them at the curling center, scraping and preparing the ice for that day’s play, and on weekends, getting the surface ready for the many bonspiels the local curling club hosts throughout the season.
“We have one the finest curling facilities anywhere,” says Susens “We want to make sure our ice is first-rate, too.”
