Wayland Curlers Head To World Youth Olympic Winter Games

WAYLAND, MA — Two members of Wayland's Broomstones curling club are heading to Switzerland in January to compete in the 2020 World Youth Olympic Winter Games. The Wayland curlers will compete with teammates from Ohio and Wisconsin against two dozen other teams.

You can see one of the 2020 Team USA members — Ethan Herbert of Lowell — in action at the Broomstones Junior Bonspiel this weekend in Wayland.

Here's more from a Broomstones press release:

Ethan Hebert, of Lowell, and Alina Tschumakow, of West Roxbury — along with
teammates Charlie Thompson and Katie Murphy — have qualified to represent Team USA at the World Youth Olympic Winter Games, taking place Jan. 10 to 22 in Switzerland.

Twenty-four countries forming mixed-format teams (involving both male and female players) will compete in a round robin tournament, concluding with a bracket-style playoff involving the top eight teams. The players will then be randomly seeded in boy/girl pairs to form 48 teams for a mixed doubles tournament to follow. In 2016, the U.S. team won the silver medal in Lillehammer, Norway for the mixed format team play.

Ethan and Alina qualified at the Youth Olympic Trials, hosted by the Denver Curling Club in Golden, Colo., in October. Eleven teams, consisting of juniors aged 14 to 17, participated in the event, each vying to become Team USA. The Hebert team was formed earlier this year and practiced multiple times over the summer at Four Seasons Curling Club in Blaine, Minn., with Coach John Benton, a 2010 curling Olympian.

Ethan, 16, is a sophomore at Lowell High School. His home club is Broomstones Curling Club in
Wayland, where he has been curling for 10 years and is a three-time U18 National participant representing the Grand National Curling Club (GNCC) region. His boys' team finished fourth in the 2019 U18 National Championships in Chaska, Minn.

Alina, 16, is a junior at Boston Latin School. Her home club is The Country Club in Chestnut Hill, and she also curls at Broomstones Curling Club. Alina has curled for 10 years and is a two-time U18 National participant representing the GNCC region. With her girls’ team, Alina won the gold at the 2019 U18 National Championships.

The sport of curling is growing in the United States — with more than 60 clubs now affiliated with the Grand National Curling Club (www.gncc.org) in the eastern U.S. — and youth participation is helping to drive its expansion. At Broomstones Curling Club (where Ethan's and Alina's Olympic dreams were born and nurtured), nearly 100 juniors between the ages of 6 and 21 practice and scrimmage most Sundays (from November to March) as part of a developmental program that teaches the skills and strategies of the game, as well as its customs and tradition of sportsmanship.

"We emphasize integrity, confidence, and technique," says Scott Price, director of Broomstones junior curling. "Our program not only prepares participants to be successful
curlers, but also fosters important life skills."

Those interested in learning more about curling, or trying it out, should visit the websites of their local clubs. Besides Broomstones in Wayland, and the Canadian Club in Brookline, there are curling clubs in the North End (Boston), Merrimack Valley (Nashua, NH), Marlborough, Blackstone Valley (Hopedale), Petersham, South Shore (Bridgewater), and in Falmouth and Orleans on the Cape. (See the complete list of curling clubs in New England, attached.) Many of the clubs hold learn-to-curl events during the season.

Broomstones will host a College Bonspiel on November 8-10 and its annual Junior Bonspiel on
November 15-17. The public is invited to attend to watch competitive youth curling in action.
As Ethan, Alina, and the rest of Team USA continue their training to get ready for the Youth Winter
Olympic Games in Switzerland (www.olympic.org/lausanne-2020), they invite you to keep track of their progress, and lend your support, at their Facebook page: facebook.com/teamusayogcurling. Learn more about the sport of curling at www.teamusa.org/usa-curling.