Curling

I admit it, I'm a total geek and I tend to always try and follow stuff that's off the beaten path. As such, I've decided from the beginning of the Olympics to watch a lot of curling. Thanks to the USA network and Tivo, that has been an easy goal to achieve. Well, it seems that I've grown to love the sport (womens and mens). It's really cool and is something that I would love to learn and do. So I moseyed on to the US curling organization website and tried to find a local chapter. No luck. I looked for some way to hook up with other like minds. No luck again. So I typed up the following email and sent it to them. Here's to hoping that they do something. In the meantime I'm going to look on meetup.com.

The email:

Hello. I have to say that I'm really enjoying the Olympic coverage of curling this year. I'm not sure if the coverage from 2002 was as comprehensive, but this year, I've been able to watch (on average) a game a day since the curling events have begun.

Obviously having watched so much of the sport, I've grown to really enjoy it and have decided that I want to play. The problem is that I'm not sure where to begin. I looked up your website in hopes that I would find a starting point. Being from Philadelphia, I've found that there isn't a local club for hundreds of miles and that’s a problem.

I was thinking that surely there are others in my area that would like to be part of a local club, but there really is no way to form one. This is where you come in. My guess is that others in my situation have done the same as I have. They probably went to your site and looked for a local chapter, having found none, they gave up. This isn't good for us and for your sport. I suggest that at some prominent place on your website you should have a "matching service" link that would allow people to register themselves in some way and when a group of say 4 or more is found close to each other, it will notify them. Perhaps your organization could offer support for that group to form a local club.

To grow your sport, you have to start at the bottom and that's the fans who want to play. Organizing them as best you could will do wonders.