The Kimberley Curling Club celebrated its 100th anniversary last year, and the 2024/25 season promises to continue the historic club's legacy, with a jam-packed slate of events that run all throughout the winter.
First up is the Halloween Bonspiel, which runs Oct. 25 to 27. This is the second year the club is hosting this event and manager Blair Jarvis is expecting this one to be a bit bigger than the first.
"Our first event of the season, we'll have a mix of teams, but we want to make sure people have a good time," Jarvis explained. "We're planning to have food for the players on both Friday and Saturday night, and we're finalizing our plan for Saturday night. We will have a prize for best team costume. We've got a few local and out of town teams registered so far."
Cost for registration is $360 per team. Get your team together and start thinking about a good group costume idea.
Looking ahead to the rest of the season, Jarvis said the Club is looking at continued growth, while maintaining the 100-year legacy of curling in Kimberley.
"We know that curling has been a big part of Kimberley's history for the last 100 years and we see an opportunity to keep growing, especially coming out of COVID and attracting kids to the sport and other new curlers to the sport and we’re trying to think of new ways of doing that," Jarvis said. "Once we get people into the curling club we feel pretty confident that they’re going to enjoy themselves and become curlers for life in some form."
Last year the club started an instructional league. They'll be doing that again this year and enrolment is already around double of what it was this time last fall.
"We're really encouraged by that," Jarvis said.
The club will be hosting two provincial events this season. First up is the U18 Provincials from December 19 to 23. There will be two local teams competing, skipped by Matthew Reynolds and Zack Pollock. There will also be a third team with local ties as Keiran Stephan, who graduated last year, will also be coming with a team.
Then on February 26 to March 1 the Club will host the High School Provincials. Selkirk will at least have a boys team competing, it is just to be determined whether they will have a girls team competing as well. There will also be other Kootenay teams competing.
"Those are good opportunities to showcase some of the good young curlers we have in the community, as well as the sport of curling, to others who may not be curling, or may have just started curling casually and can see, 'hey yeah, those kids who curl next me can compete with the best in the province,'" Jarvis said. "And maybe that's something they can look forward to doing as they get older."
Other events include:
•The Women 4 Women Bonspiel on November 30 that will raise funds for the Cranbrook Women's Resource Centre and the Kimberley Food Bank;
•The Holiday Funspiel, a fun, social event before Christmas on December 14 and 15;
•The Doubles Bonspiel on New Year's Eve
•The annual Snow Fiesta on January 17 and 19
•The Rotary Junior Bonspiel from February 1 to 3
•The Club Championship/Windup on March 14 to 15
Leagues for the year start on Tuesday, Oct. 15 and will run to Mid-March. There will be leagues running Sunday to Thursday evening, with the Daytimers league at 10 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Jarvis said that with Kimberley having so many winter activities available, curling may not always be the first pick for everyone, which is why the club is working to share the sport and increase their presence in the community.
"We get that we’re not going to be for everyone, because we may be number one on my list, but we might be number four or number five on someone else’s list," he said. "If you’ve got kids and all those types of things it can be hard to fit in all the good things you can do in Kimberley, but for a segment of the population, we know that we can be a good choice and it’s a matter of making people aware of what we have to offer, how cost effective it is, especially for junior curling relative to some of the other kids’ activities that are out there."
He added that historically, curling was one of the main activities to do in the winter in smaller communities, and that the sport as an entity is working to adapt.
"My parents curled and I remember them saying you’d have to go and line up on the first day registration opened or you wouldn’t get in," Jarvis said. "And it’s a bit of a different reality now that there’s a lot more options out there and I think the sport took a little while to adapt and realize that if we want people to participate, you can’t just have a building you actually have to get out there, foster a welcoming environment, make sure you have programs that work for people who are very hardcore into curling, but also for casual curlers or brand-new and also make sure it’s not too much of an intimidating thing."
Jarvis explained CurlBC is working to break down those barriers to entry, as is the Kimberley Curling Club. The instructional league is a great way for people to try the sport out for a low cost and at an eight-week duration, a low time commitment. People are welcome to come and try it out and see if the sport is for them.
To learn more and to register for the above-mentioned tournaments, visit: curlkimberley.ca
