Random Curling Team Generator

So the tool gave you a curling team

You wanted a curling team and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand. Some entries are Canadian provinces and territories. Most are a surname with the word Team in front of it.

The tool is the simple part. Curling is the most misunderstood sport at any Winter Olympics, watched by millions who find it inexplicably compelling and could not tell you a single rule. Nearly everything about how it is organised is unusual, starting with those names.

Why the team is named after one person

Team Homan. Team Mouat. Team Edin. Team Gushue. In no other sport does a professional side simply take the surname of one of its four players.

The player is the skip, who stands at the far end, calls every shot, decides the strategy, and throws the last two stones of every end when the game is usually decided. The skip is captain, tactician and closer at once, and a curling team is understood to be an expression of that person's judgement. Rinks form around a skip, and when a skip retires the team usually dissolves rather than continue under a new name.

The other entries on this list, Team Alberta, Team Manitoba, Team Northern Ontario, come from a different tradition entirely. Canada's national championships, the Brier for men and the Scotties for women, are contested by provinces and territories, so a rink that wins in Alberta arrives at the national event as Team Alberta. Ontario is large enough to send two. It is a competition structure descended from a country where curling is a genuine folk sport, and the winner of it goes on to represent Canada as Team Canada, which is why that entry sits at the top of the list.

The ice is not flat, and that is the point

Before a curling match, an ice technician walks the sheet with a backpack of water and sprays a fine mist over it, which freezes into tiny bumps. This is called pebble, and without it the sport would not exist.

A forty-four pound granite stone slid across smooth ice would grip and travel almost straight. Sliding across pebble, it rides on the tops of the frozen droplets, and its rotation makes it curl sideways, several feet across the length of the sheet. That curl is the entire game. It lets a stone bend around a guard and strike another that it cannot see in a straight line. As a match wears on, the pebble wears down, the ice changes, and the amount a stone curls changes with it, so a skip is reading a surface that is quietly rewriting itself under the stones. And the stones themselves come, almost all of them, from one small uninhabited island of very particular granite off the Scottish coast.

What the sweeping actually does

Everybody has seen curlers sweeping furiously in front of a moving stone and assumed, reasonably, that they are pushing it along. They are not. They cannot touch it.

The brooms momentarily heat the ice, creating a microscopically thin film of water that reduces friction. Two things follow. The stone travels further, by as much as several metres over a full slide, and it curls less, because a stone that is sliding more freely bends less. So the sweepers are not accelerating a stone; they are extending it and straightening it, and the skip is shouting because those two effects are the only means of correcting a throw once it has left the hand. A team that sweeps well can rescue a shot that was thrown a foot wide or a touch light. It is also brutally hard physical work, which is why elite curlers are considerably fitter than the sport's gentle reputation suggests.

The hammer, and why you might throw a stone away

A game is divided into ends. In each end, the two teams throw eight stones apiece, alternating, and only one team scores: the one with the stone nearest the centre of the target counts every stone it has closer than its opponent's best.

Throwing last is an enormous advantage, and it has a name: the hammer. Here is where curling turns into chess. If you hold the hammer and can only manage to score one point, you have effectively wasted it, because scoring hands the hammer to the other team for the next end. So a skip with the hammer will often decline the single point, deliberately removing their own stone from play to score nothing and keep the hammer, a manoeuvre called a blank end. Choosing to score zero in order to keep an advantage is not a thing most sports permit you to contemplate, and it is the moment a casual viewer realises the people sliding stones are conducting a fairly deep argument about position.

The sport that referees itself

Curling has umpires, and they measure stones when nobody can agree by eye. Beyond that they do very little, because the players call their own fouls.

If a curler's broom brushes a moving stone, which is a burned stone and often invisible to everyone else, they are expected to say so, immediately, and they do, in world finals, when it costs them the match. A team that knows it cannot win concedes rather than force the other side to play out a formality. Matches begin and end with handshakes, and the winner traditionally buys the loser a drink. This is written down, more or less, as the Spirit of Curling, and it survives at professional level in a way that similar codes in other sports simply have not. Draw a team from this tool and you have pulled four people who would tell the umpire they had cheated.

What a random curling team is good for

• Olympic and Brier sweepstakes. Draw rinks for a group and follow the bonspiel.
• Quiz and trivia prep. Ask what sweeping does. Almost everybody gets it wrong.
• Club nights. Drawing teams or opponents for a local competition.
• Discovering the sport. Draw a team, watch an end, and count how often the skip declines a point.
• Settling a debate. Pull two rinks and argue the greater one, which in curling means arguing about two skips.

Curling questions

Why are curling teams named after a person?

After the skip, who calls every shot and throws the last stones of each end. Rinks form around a skip and usually dissolve when that player retires. Provincial names like Team Alberta come from Canada's national championships, which are contested by province.

Does sweeping make the stone go faster?

No. Sweeping briefly melts a thin film of water that reduces friction, so the stone travels further and curls less. Sweepers cannot touch the stone, only the ice in front of it.

What is the hammer?

The right to throw the final stone of an end, which is a major advantage. Because scoring passes the hammer to your opponent, a team holding it will sometimes deliberately score nothing, a blank end, to keep it for the next one.

Can I pull several teams, or narrow the pick?

Both. Raise the number for a few at once, with none repeating in a single pull, and use the text boxes to narrow things, such as a keyword the entry has to contain, which is handy for separating provincial teams from skip-named rinks.

References

1. World Curling. worldcurling.org
2. Curling Canada. curling.ca