In Mount Laurel, curling wins converts

Never curled before? Frank Sharp has some advice for you.

"Walk like a penguin" to keep your balance, he tells 32 curling newbies at the Igloo Ice Rink in Mount Laurel, where they are eager to get started. "If you fall, fall like a turtle. Protect your head."

Sharp and his wife, Jane, are launching the sport of curling - sometimes likened to shuffleboard, or chess, on ice - in South Jersey. The first game was last February on Mimosa Lake near their Medford home; by the end of December, 187 adults and youngsters had attended "Learn to Curl" sessions at the Igloo, and 57 have joined the Jersey Pinelands Curling Club.

"Curling is a lot harder than it looks, but there's a really fast learning curve," says Jane, who began playing the game with her husband in Plainfield, Union County, in 2010. "Within a couple of hours, [newcomers] are curling with people they've never met before, and having a great time."

A competitive yet convivial team sport born on a frozen loch somewhere in 16th-century Scotland, curling involves sleek little stones, referred to as rocks. They look like designer teakettles, weigh more than 40 pounds, and are typically made of the granite found on a Scottish island called Ailsa Craig.

Curling also involves all manner of lore and lingo (broomstacking is the term for a postgame cold one, or two), as I find out during a "Learn to Curl" session the day after Christmas.

"This is the biggest session we've had so far," Jane says, as the crowd of men and women, most of them young or in middle age, prepare for their first lesson.

Curling Club volunteers set up the ice, marking out the lanes between "hacks," from which the rocks are propelled, as well as the targets, called houses, in the ice.

People familiar with curling from watching it on TV - it's been a Winter Olympics event since 1998 - might be surprised by the distances traveled during the two-hour game, says Bridget O'Grady, 28, of Northeast Philadelphia.

Players rotate among the positions, including the all-important duo who "sweep" or "brush" the ice ahead of the moving rocks.

"You have to deliver the rock and sweep the rock and stay with the rock" for more than 130 feet, says O'Grady, the office manager at the Igloo and a Pinelands Curling Club member. The former figure skater says she "got hooked" the first time she played last summer.

Players don't skate but rather slide, walk, and run on the ice. Slip-on soles, called grippers, are available for those who don't have curling shoes.

Swiffer-like brooms, delivery sticks, and stabilizers are essential; zany leggings and other fun garb popular among some are optional. Teams are made up of four members, playing the positions of lead, second, vice, and skip.

"I love the sport," says Sue Niedrach, a counselor at a Mercer County middle school who lives in Medford and grew up with curling in Schenectady, N.Y. "Getting a bit of exercise is a bonus, but I would say the strategy and social aspects are what make the game."

Jane wasn't kidding about the learning curve. After about an hour, actual curling is underway. And not for nothing is it traditionally called "the roaring game," particularly when five games are being played at once.

The Igloo resounds with the commands of the skips, who are like coaches, urging the broom-carrying duos to warm the ice and increase the speed of the stones.

Sweep! Sweep! Sweep! Sweep!

It's great, frenetic fun, even to someone whose last foray onto the ice was during elementary school half a century ago.

"I loved being able to actually try it," says Nicolette Stoner, 20, of Mount Laurel, who fell in love with the game watching the Olympics and got a Learn to Curl gift certificate for Christmas.

A senior at Stevenson University in Maryland, where she is majoring in business communications, Stoner plays soccer recreationally but found curling to be physically and mentally demanding.

"It's also difficult strategically," she adds, noting that teams have opportunities to knock an opposing team's rock out of position.

But Stoner's team won, 4-3.

"I was not the one who threw the stone," she says. "But I was the one to help brush it in."