A morning with the Evergreen Curling Club

It's never too early to start throwing stones.

BEAVERTON — It was inevitable that I ended up at the Evergreen Curling Club.

It’s not that I’ve long wanted to take up a sport whose roots in Oregon date back further than football and basketball — it’s just that I’m a realist.

I grew up on ice, playing hockey since I first strapped on the skates as a 7-year-old in Alaska. I played in high school, joined the club team when I went to college in Montana and, since moving to Portland in 2012, have been making the regular trek up to Mountain View Ice Arena in Vancouver or Winterhawks Skating Center out in Beaverton for weekly Beer League games.

But I’m 35 now. Those 10 p.m. puck drops are getting tougher to bounce back from and those bruises from taking a crosscheck, blocking a shot or tripping over the blue line seem to linger a lot more than they did when I was in my 20s.

Curling? That shuffleboard-looking game where you throw a granite stone down the ice at a target? The one where a guy like this — Matt Hamilton — can win a gold medal?

Yeah, that just feels like the next step in my on-ice evolution.

So when former Ducks reporter Kevin Wade hit me up earlier this year about coming out to the volunteer-run Evergreen Curling Club, I knew I had to stop by.

The facility, located in a business park just off Highway 217, is nondescript on the outside. I showed up at 9:30 a.m. and wondered if I was in the right place until I saw a few people pulling brooms, shoes and crockpots full of chili out of their cars and walking through the front door.

Inside, I immediately felt at home. To my right were locker rooms. To my left was a bar that peered out to a long, thin sheet of ice being resurfaced before the morning’s weekly Winter League session.

The club was formed in 2002 and first operated at Mountain View before moving out to the Lloyd Center and then eventually here to Beaverton in 2013. It’s one of only six facilities west of the Mississippi dedicated to curling full-time and has a membership base that’s closing in on 300 members.

I found Kevin, got equipped with some grippers to slip over my shoes and felt targeted by some of the literature on the walls.

We took to the ice, which is more tactile than a traditional hockey rink, and I was immediately struck by the distance of the playing surface. Those throws don’t look long on TV and the stones are heavy. After a quick tutorial from club expert Steve Meyer, my first throw saw my stone barely reach halfway down the ice. On my next throw, I overcompensated and hurled the stone well beyond the target.

“Come on, Goldilocks,” Steve said.

“This is tricky,” I replied. It’s hard enough keeping your balance as you slide down the ice in a lunge. Then when you consider the distance, spin and other factors, I found the sport to be much tougher than I initially anticipated.

“If you have three full games going on and two of them finish early, like if you’re getting your butt kicked and everyone is like ‘Let’s go drink,’ 16 people leave the building and the air temperature changes — the humidity changes,” Steve said. “And that’ll affect the ice.”

On the two sheets next to us were about a dozen folks, mostly older, who were making things look about as easy as they do on TV. Their throws looked effortless as they slid down the ice. They had sweepers improving the path of the stones at the direction of the team captain — the skip. They were putting beautiful spin on their stones, as opposed to the “knuckleballs” that I seemed to keep throwing.

But that’s just it — Steve had me keep throwing. I probably threw 20 stones before I felt like I had triangulated the distance. And when I challenged Kevin to a quick one-on-one match — he’s been playing regularly since 2021 — the only way I can describe the feeling of sliding my first stone into the house is the same feeling I get from scoring a goal or making a great pass in hockey.

It took time. It took a fair amount of luck on my part. And while Kevin dusted me pretty easily — we were playing without sweepers, just throwing — I immediately wanted to play again.

I could see why so many people come out here. And I can also see why the club features players from the elderly all the way down to youth teams that are now getting good enough to compete at nationals. It’s fun. It’s accessible. And while it’s relatively quick to learn, it seems like a sport that’s exceptionally hard to master.

“It’s a J-curve,” Kevin said. “You start out and once you get past that Learn to Curl and Curling 101, you feel like you have a baseline. Then as you really start to work on those fundamentals, get your slide, get your control down, get your weights dialed in and know, ‘Hey, I need to throw this to take out a stone, or I need to put this right at the top of the house,’ you start to fall. But then you pick it back up and you improve once you figure out what’s comfortable for your body and what you do well.”

It was an entirely unique experience. But it was also a familiar one. Like any good beer league hockey team, the club thrives on community. It’s a gathering place where people catch up, swap stories, discuss strategy and love being around each other.

When my hour session came to an end, I made it off the ice without falling — at least that experience translated — made it back to my car and immediately realized two things:

1. My legs were dead and I had worked up a good sweat.

2. While I’m not quite ready to hang up the skates, I now know I have a long future ahead of me on the ice.

— Tyson Alger, The I-5 Corridor

Learn more about Evergreen Curling Club here.