PORTLAND, Maine — In 2006, Dianne Ballon was watching the Winter Olympics on TV when one event piqued her interest — curling.
Ballon immediately turned to the Belfast Curling Club, the only rink in Maine dedicated to the sport. It was a 100-mile roundtrip from Gardiner, where she lived at the time, but she had to try it.
“They had learn-to-curl the next day,” Ballon, who is 72 and now lives in Portland, said.
Nearly 30 years later, Ballon is still sliding, at Portland’s William B. Troubh Ice Arena in the Tuesday morning league run by the Pine Tree Curling Club.
Interest in curling sweeps Maine and the world during the Winter Olympics. The state’s two public curling clubs see a spike in inquiries and interview requests. Organizers and members said they try to capitalize on the moment, hoping to turn once-every-four-years fans into lifelong players.
This year has been particularly exciting for the United States, as Korey Dropkin and Cory Thiesse just won a silver medal in the mixed doubles event.
“My phone is blowing up with people who are asking me questions about curling,” said Craig Gray, a wheelchair curler who lives in Scarborough.
Maine’s curling clubs
Sierra Dietz grew up at the Belfast Curling Club. Her parents were members and they often brought Dietz and her brother along for the evening instead of hiring a babysitter.
She didn’t play, though, preferring to socialize with the other kids waiting off the ice.
“I thought curling was for old people,” Dietz, now 50, said with a laugh.
When she moved back to the area as an adult, her thinking had evolved. In search of new friends and a way to pass the dark winter nights, she and her husband joined the curling club.
Twenty-five years later, Dietz is the president.
Curling, which originated in Scotland, debuted at the 1924 Games and was occasionally demonstrated over decades at the Olympics. It was added to the official Olympic program in 1998.
The Belfast Curling Club opened in 1959 on a site that had previously been flooded and frozen for outdoor play. Today, the facility has a rink with three sheets — the name for playing areas, roughly 150-feet long — and a warm room for events.
Important to a true curling club, regulars said, is the bar, where the winners traditionally buy a round for the losers.
The club now has more than 300 members, including many who drive an hour or more to play in Belfast.
“We have curlers that are as young as 10 all the way up to people in their 80s,” Dietz said.
In Portland, the Pine Tree Curling Club started in 2015 and now has more than 70 members. For years, the club has talked about building a dedicated curling facility in southern Maine.
President Andrew Burbank speaks highly of those who run the city-owned Troubh Ice Arena, but said sharing the rink with skaters isn’t ideal. The club has to spend time before every session on a technique called pebbling, or spraying water droplets that freeze, creating a bumpy surface that reduces friction so the stone will slide across the ice.
Burbank said he would like to see membership grow to at least 100 in order to support the construction of a new club. He’s been adding more information to the club’s website and trying to make trying the sport easy for new players so they will continue curling long after the closing ceremonies in Italy.
The Tuesday league, for example, is geared toward beginners.
“It does build interest,” Burbank said of the Olympics, “but not always in a way that’s sticky.”
‘The roaring game’
One thing to know about curling: it’s harder than the pros make it look on TV.
“It is hard, and you’re not going to do it at the same level as the Olympians are doing it, but it is something anybody can try,” Dietz said. “It feels different to me than any of the other sports. I’m never going to do a ski jump. How many places would you go to try out luge?”
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Megan Gray can be reached at mgray@pressherald.com.