Curling Team Competition Kit

Different ice conditions — a firm head for hard, keen ice; a softer head for frosty, slow ice. The head is the contact surface that does the sweeping; matching it to the ice is a competitive edge. The pros swap heads between events. It is the curling equivalent of choosing the tire for the track.

For practice off the game — slip it on over your gripper shoe and practice the slide and the balance without changing into full curling shoes. It is the warmup and the training tool at the rink, before a game or at a practice sheet. The serious curler carries one for the pre-game slide groove.

A stopwatch timing the stone's travel from the hog line to the back — a measure of the ice's speed (the "draw weight"). The team times every stone and reads the trend, calling the weight for the next shot. A consistent timer (and a consistent thrower) is how competitive teams dial in the draw over the course of a game.

The swing (how much the stone curls) and the speed (how far it draws) change across the sheet and over the game as the pebble wears. The skip reads the path of every stone and tells the thrower where to aim to account for the curl. Ice-reading is the skip's master skill; the thrower executes the read.