Gold medalist John Shuster hosts youth curling clinic in Detroit Lakes for lakes area youth

Detroit Lakes, Minn. (KDLM) – More than 35 youth curlers from the lakes area and surrounding region attended a youth curling clinic at Lakes Curling Club in Detroit Lakes hosted by two-time Olympic curling medalist John Shuster.

One child and their parent traveled from San Fransisco to attend the clinic with the Olympian.

Jake Blow, lead instructor at Lakes Curling Club, said they began the club’s youth program two years ago and they’ve already seen interest skyrocket in the sport. He added the Minnesota Curling Association is sponsoring a curling state tournament for high schoolers for the first time since the 1970s due to the rising popularity of the sport.

“This year the Minnesota Curling Association is sponsoring a state tournament for the first time in about 50 years,” said Blow. “We don’t really even know when the last one was, but it was in the 1970s at some point. We have one member of our club who is from Roseau, who used to play high school curling in Minnesota, and then it kind of died out. And now the format it, a lot of the kids in this advanced group, they just kinda find other curlers who are serious about it, and they form a team, and they go to bonspiels. Very similar to our USGA gymnastics … but very little, what I would say, school spirit.”

Blow said he met John Shuster at a youth bonspiel in Bemidji, where Shuster’s kids were participating, and he said he’d be more than happy to come out to Detroit Lakes to hold the clinic.

“It’s pretty unheard of in any sport, you don’t really have the Olympians show up that aren’t attached to your town,” he said. “You know the Warroad guys will go back to Warroad. But we just kind of ran into (Shuster) at a bonspiel in another town, I think it was Bemidji. We just got to know him. He’s just a regular guy and he said, ‘yeah, I do some stuff with youth, so if you have anything you want to organize, I’d be happy to come down.’ There you go. Gold medal is in town.”

Shuster has represented Team USA curling in the past five winter Olympic games, which culminated in a bronze medal during the 2006 winter games in Turino and a gold medal in the 2018 games in PyeongChang.

He started off the youth session by practicing a drill with some of the curlers. They had to push themselves out of the hack without a stone and come to a stop right in front of a red solo cup on the other side of the hog line. And even the Olympic gold medalist himself found it difficult to nail the landing on the first try.

Olympic curling gold medalist John Shuster watches kids slide on curling ice during a youth curling clinic at Lakes Curling Club in Detroit Lakes on Dec. 27, 2023. (Michael Achterling / KDLM)

Shuster said he was in the exact same position as the young kids who showed up to the clinic at one point.

“Any chance you can get to get kids out onto the ice and get them to have some success, like throwing a rock down the sheet and having it go into the house, or slide out and feel the balance of a good curling delivery” said Shuster. “The first group we had today had a bunch of kids who had only been on the ice, maybe once or twice, or never been on the ice. For me, I remember the first time being on the curling ice and throwing my first proper rock, and that was all it took for me. And if we can do that for kids in this area, around the state, and we’ve seen it happening in Duluth-Superior where my kids are curling now. And our numbers are getting to be an all-time high, and they are getting to be an all-time high at a lot of places in our state.”

He also said there is something unique about curling that builds friendships and camaraderie better than most sports because of the social aspect of the game. 

“It’s the camaraderie that comes along with the game,” said Shuster. “The game itself is very similar to golf, where you can kind of be okay where you can get out and have fun with it. And some days it can really feel really easy, and then some days you feel like you have no idea how to make a shot and that happens at even our level right now. Not quite to that extent, but it does feel that way sometimes. But, the camaraderie, you get done with a game, you generally sit down with the other team. You know tables in curling clubs have eight chairs around them for a reason because there are eight people that play in a game and you sit with your opponent. And it’s that camaraderie where you sit around a table and expand your network. I think my wife and I had 400-some people at our wedding because both of us had been in the curling club for so long that it seemed impossible to not invite half of the curling club to our wedding.”

Blow said anyone interested in youth curling in the lakes area should reach out to him on the group’s Facebook page, or just come to one of the novice league nights every Monday evening at the club, located off Highway 59 in Detroit Lakes.