Wheelchair curlers watch the action at the RA Centre.
While Centretown-based curlers have been enjoying a banner year in 2011 – with rinks from the Ottawa and Rideau clubs performing well at provincial and national competitions – the increasingly popular wheelchair version of the sport won’t be coming to downtown Ottawa anytime soon.
Led by skip Jim Armstrong of British Columbia, Team Canada took the wheelchair curling titles in the latest World Championships and Paralympic Games.
“There is nowhere to go but up for the sport in this country,” says Greg Stremlaw, CEO of the Canadian Curling Association.
If the recent Canadian Wheelchair Curling Championship is any indication, Stremlaw has reason to be optimistic. Hosted by the Jasper Place Curling Club in Edmonton, the tournament included 10 teams for only the second time in its history. By comparison, the inaugural competition held in 2004 in London, Ont., featured only four teams.
“The sport is not in every single province at the moment, but there are more and more teams competing all the time, which is very exciting for us,” Stremlaw says.
The sport is also attracting attention in Ottawa.
Currently, the premier wheelchair-specific club in the city is housed at the RA Centre, located on Riverside Drive.
That’s where about 20 members of the Capital Wheelchair Curling Club gather on Saturday afternoons to participate in the sport they love.
As the recreation co-ordinator for the RA Centre, Mark Fish is involved with both the wheelchair and able-bodied games.
He says the former has grown significantly in popularity and exposure since it began at the centre almost seven years ago.
“It has grown very quickly, and it has been integrated into the community and very positively received,” he says.
The highlight of this growth came in November of 2010, when the RA Centre hosted the sixth annual Cathy Kerr Memorial Bonspiel.
The tournament involved 15 teams, including two from the United States, making it the largest wheelchair curling competition in the world.
But beyond the doors of the multi-purpose sporting facility, enthusiasm for wheelchair curling is not nearly as evident.
Dalal Abou-Eid, manager of the Ottawa Curling Club, says the club cannot accommodate the sport. While it has a history of holding events for both blind curlers and those with a mental disability, Abou-Eid says wheelchair curling is not in the OCC’s plans at the moment.
“We don’t have anything for wheelchair curling because the building is too old to support it, so it’s not something we are considering right now.”
The situation is much the same at the sport’s other Centretown facility, the Rideau Curling Club.
For wheelchair-curling coach Debra Karbashewski, this is indicative of a much larger problem.
“It just provides another example of how in a modern world, we have created an environment which is really inconvenient to disabled people,” she said in an email.
Karbashewski is the coach of Ken Gregory’s wheelchair rink, which operates out of Bradford, Ont.
The team narrowly missed out on the chance to represent Ontario at the national tournament in Edmonton this year. They fell to Chris Rees’ Toronto rink in the provincial final, 8-3.
While Stremlaw and Fish say they are hopeful that increased media coverage for wheelchair curling is on the horizon,
Karbashewski says there are some remaining obstacles to be overcome.
“I think it would not be considered good television material right now, because although the quality of the game is improving, it is still a very young sport,” she said.
“Also, it is not as animated and there is no sweeping, so I don’t see television coverage on the horizon.”
While it’s unclear when the sport will attract mainstream attention, Stremlaw says the athletes involved can act as an inspiration.
“At the end of the day these are success stories,” he says, “and just because these curlers have a physical disability doesn’t mean they aren’t great athletes.”