Brushing
Dryland training for brushing footwork
This article is a revision to an article that originally was published on the Ontario Curling Council website on 11 June 2016. In the Curling Canada High Performance Program coaching manual, under “Technical Development: Sweeping”, you will find the following quote attributed to Darryl Horne: Without doubt sweeping is the most under-coached, under-practiced, under-appreciated, and under-rated aspect of the game. In my experience in working with U15, U18, and U20 teams over the past 14 seasons, a common development issue with athletes is in mastering the biomechanics necessary for brushing effectively, that is insuring that the forces the athlete develops through the brush handle are optimal to the task. To assist athletes with learning the correct footwork for brushing in the closed stance, in the spring of 2016 I built a “footwork trainer” (see video at right) that athletes could use through the spring and summer in order to gain sufficient speed, stamina, and muscle memory in order to achieve
Mapping delivery split times to hog-to-hog times
In a previous article, John Newhook and I described ten reasons why the use of split times can be problematic for a team. Using interval, or “split” times, can benefit the delivering team because an interval time provides a proxy measurement for the velocity of a curling stone at the point of release. With an interval time, the two brushers can utilize the time to assist with their weight judgement, and the delivering player can use a split time to assist their delivery with respect to weight control. One of the complications that we mentioned was that there is no straightforward, easy-to-compute mapping between split times and hog-to-hog times. Not only are interval times subject to user error, but the mapping between a split and a hog-to-hog time depends to a significant extent on a particular athlete’s delivery technique (rate of deceleration during the slide phase, and/or an accompanying arm extension, to name but two variables), ice conditions (the coefficient
High-performance brushing in the open stance
This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on the Ontario Curling Council website on 4 October 2017. This is joint work with John Newhook of Dalhousie University. We would like to thank Fraser Reid, former Canadian university champion with Wilfrid Laurier University, and Paige Bown of Team Dominique Vivier, for their demonstrations of brushing in the open stance. As coaches, we ordinarily teach brushing in the open stance to novices. For novice players, the open stance is considerably safer than alternative tactics. In the open stance, the player faces the skip while brushing and the feet are both facing forward, making the open stance much easier to learn for beginning players. Karlee Burgess and brushing partner Emily Zacharias brush a draw during the 2023 Manitoba provincial playdowns. Both athletes are in the closed stance. Photo credit: Connie Laliberte. Before ‘Broomgate’ in 2015, the Rules of Curling stipulated that any brushing motion had to take place fully
A preliminary investigation into knifing
On the afternoon of February 19, 2026 I met with Sean Maw and his research team from the University of Saskatchewan, along with Rob Gordon from World Curling, at the Nutana Curling Club in Saskatoon, SK to conduct some preliminary work into the brushing tactic of knifing, and to continue a profiling survey of a selection of Nutana’s curling stones. Curling stone profiling One of the many variables to be considered when doing on-ice testing of curling equipment – particularly brushes – is the characteristics of the curling stones being used in the tests: both mass and the roughness of their running bands. Mass is trivial to measure with a standard weigh scale; but having a quantitative measure of a stone’s running band requires a surface roughness profilometer, such as the Mitutoyo SJ-410. The video at right illustrates the output of the SJ-410 on a single path across a curling stone’s running band. https://youtu.be/2dFJ8JxPm_g To produce a profile of a
Calibrating the CurlSmart instrumented brush
Frequently, the athletes that I work with on brushing – over 550 since the 2014-2015 season – complain about the CurlSmart instrumented brush for two reasons: it’s, well, heavy. Including the 9V lithium battery, the CurlSmart brush head weighs 534 g, somewhere between 2x and 3x the typical weight of a commercial brush head due to its steel plate construction. The black Cordura nylon fabric on the brush head, which we use for its durability, doesn’t have nearly the same “feel” as a World Curling-approved brush head. Cordura nylon is used on the CurlSmart brush because replacing the fabric on the brush head is a fairly involved procedure that requires disassembling the head, stapling in the new fabric, and reassembling. Moreover, replacing the fabric usually merits a subsequent calibration test of the brush to ensure that the procedure did not impact the brush’s accuracy. Nevertheless, we chose to replace the black Cordura nylon with SportLite+ fabric from Balance Plus in
The physics of curling – with Sean Maw, University of Saskatchewan
This past week, my friend and research colleague Sean Maw, who is the Jerry G. Huff Chair in Innovative Teaching and an Associate Professor in the Ron and Jane Graham School of Professional Development, Division of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan, was interviewed by Matt Olson for the University of Saskatchewan’s Signature Series podcasts. In the interview, Sean outlines a number of research problems with respect to the physics of curling and our short-term research goals for the near future. There remains a considerable amount of work before we come to a more complete understanding of the physics of curling, including the impact of brushing. You can listen to the complete interview by clicking on the introduction at left, or you can listen to the podcast on Apple podcasts (and others) by searching for the University of Saskatchewan Signature Series podcasts.