By Amanda Oliver
Moe Aubry has a different perspective from most curlers when he looks down the smooth sheet of ice at the City View Curling Club in Nepean.
Aubry is partially blind. So are his teammates. Together, they are the Ottawa Blind Curling Club.
These 15 men and three women are like any other league, in any other city. Blind curlers from all parts of Ottawa are welcome to join. They come together weekly, for the company and love of the game. Still, they are also very different.
“Everyone on the team has less than 10 per cent vision with corrective lenses,” Aubry says.
That means the players are legally blind, either partially or totally. But because of this league, they can curl.
This month an Ottawa team from this club won the provincial blind curling championships. They beat out six other cities, each represented by two teams. This was Ottawa’s thirty-first medal in 25 years and Aubry has been there for every single one of them.
Aubry, 78, is a retired police officer. He lost his vision when a head injury triggered a hereditary eye condition.
He has been part of the club since it was created through the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. The local Kiwanis Club originally approached the national organization looking for a way to help the blind community. Someone suggested curling. Aubry heard about the project and, with the help of a friend, founded the club in 1978.
Ottawa’s blind curlers have come a long way since then. Aubry had never curled before. Neither had the 11 others who came out to the Lansdowne Curling Club that year.
But Ontario already had a blind curling association with several teams across the province and it was willing to help Ottawa get started.
The blind team in Kingston loaned their coaches to the Ottawa club for a crash course in curling. At the end of their first season, Ottawa placed third in the provincial championships.
“It was the first time we played against any other city and we had one heck of a ball,” Aubry says.
Since then, the club has returned every year to the championships to compete against other blind teams. Today there are teams in Kitchener, London, Toronto, Oshawa, Hamilton, Kingston and Ottawa. The league had 200 curlers several years ago, but that has dropped down to 61 as players retire.
Still, the Ontario group hopes to expand nationally in coming years. The Kiwanis Club still supports the curlers, providing coaches and some funding for the annual trip to the provincials. Players each pay $130 to participate for the season.
They play much like sighted curlers. Same brooms, same rocks, same rinks. But every team has a coach with full vision, as well as one player who is totally blind.
The coach serves as the players’ eyes. He sees for the players, looking at the shot and telling them when they are properly lined up. They adapt the system to each player’s range of sight.
“Because of the way we do it, I can curl,” Robert Boudreau says.
A genetic disorder called retinitis pigmentosa has left him with only seven per cent of his vision — literally, tunnel vision.
Boudreau has been a team member since 1990. He is the treasurer of the Ontario Blind Curling Association and also of the Ottawa club. Although he joined the team without any experience, curling has now been part of his life for 13 years. To fellow blind curler Albert Masiowski, that’s just the beginning.
“I have been curling off and on for 54 years,” Masiowski says.
He has slowly been losing his vision during that time.
Masiowski has macular degeneration. It has left him with less than 10 per cent of his normal vision. But the loss of sight hasn’t stopped him from playing the game he learned as a child.
“One of the good aspects of the club is it gives blind people the opportunity to develop an expertise in something that they can do with people from the normal world,” Masiowski says.
The club, Aubry says, is always looking for new members.
The curling season winds to a close in early April. But as always, Aubry will be back the following year.
“I like everything about curling. I like the sport, I like the company, especially the company.”