Curling gets a blast of colour

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/02/2019 (2433 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SYDNEY, N.S. — In a way, the dream was familiar: Colin Hodgson just wanted to get to the Brier. He’d already been there once as a curler, of course, throwing lead rocks for Reid Carruthers.

Now, as co-owner of the Winnipeg-based apparel company Dynasty Curling, he hungered to make it to nationals as an entrepreneur, too.

The chance came sooner than he expected. Late last summer, Dynasty inked a new four-year deal with Curling Canada to make uniforms for its events, including the Scotties and the Brier. Just four years after it was founded, Dynasty had grown at peel-weight speed, and Hodgson was elated. 

“It was something I thought maybe far in the future we would have a chance of getting,” he says, chatting in a dim-light lounge at Sydney’s Centre 200 on Saturday. “But I didn’t think we would build the company so fast that we could pull off something like making the uniforms for the Scotties, or the Brier.” 

The big news came with big work attached, too. It meant only a few months to design 17 distinct regional uniforms, and a myriad of factors to consider. So a complete redesign wasn’t going to be possible this year, but Hodgson and his business partners knew what they wanted to do. 

Out with the old, in with the new. The sport has gone through groundswells of change in the past two decades since making its official Olympic debut. So why shouldn’t the look of curling change, too? 

“Our sport, as a whole, has been very conservative for a very long time,” Hodgson says. “Because it’s been so conservative, it’s going to take some time to break that mould of what people think you should be wearing. And one of the thoughts I had was to change the old mindset of, ‘everybody needs to look the same.’” 

In previous years, Scotties and Brier jerseys were straightforward, primarily white and emblazoned on the back with simple abbreviations: MB for Manitoba, for instance. But for their debut as uniform designers, Dynasty wanted to make more of a splash. They wanted each uniform to feel unique to its region. 

After a flurry of consultations with stakeholders — everyone from Curling Canada to regional organizations, and even avid club curlers — they came up with a plan. They would pump up the colours on the jerseys and crown the backs with custom logos that paid tribute to provincial or territorial culture. 

Some logos were an easy choice: for Team Canada, slap a maple leaf on the back. Prince Edward Island was more challenging: “It’s really known for potatoes, but how the heck do you put a potato on?” Hodgson says with a laugh. After a lot of discussion, they eventually settled on an outline of the island.

Alberta got a wild rose. Saskatchewan, a sheaf of wheat. For Manitoba, Dynasty went to the vaults and revived the retro wordmark bison that was long a staple of provincial branding. Hodgson, who grew up in Alberta, remembered that iconic logo well from his own youth, playing against Manitoba. So it was hard to resist. 

“That was the coolest logo I’ve ever seen,” he says. “When I was a kid at Canadian juniors, that was the one jersey everybody wanted, that stylized buffalo. So that was really neat to bring back.”

But the most dramatic change to this year’s jerseys is simply the colours. Team shirts this year are saturated in bold hues, from jewel-blue to golden yellow. It was a deliberate choice by Dynasty to break out of that old white-dominant box — which is funny for Hodgson, considering he’s partially colour-blind. 

“I can’t draw, and I’m colour-blind, and we make clothing for thousands of curlers every year,” he says with a laugh. “That’s why we have a great designer. He tells me when I have terrible ideas, and I listen to him.”

(By the way, if you’re wondering whether that affects him on the ice, the answer is yes, it does. “I can’t tell rocks from the other end,” he says. “They all look greyscale to me. I’ve said really dumb things on TV before, like, ‘why don’t we just hit it?’ and my skip goes, ‘we’re sitting four.’ Oops, nevermind.”) 

Nowhere is the burst of colour more evident than in the wild-card uniforms. Dynasty made two colourways, one for each contender in Friday’s play-in game: a teal green, and a nearly radioactive bright orange. Kerri Einarson chose  green, so the orange fell to Alberta’s Casey Scheidegger. 

At first, Scheidegger’s team was a “little nervous” about the hue, the skip says. It didn’t take long for them to come around. After beating Einarson, Scheidegger told reporters the jackets were so bright she could see the glare reflected in her lead’s teeth; to Hodgson, an old friend, they jokingly called themselves Team Pylon.  

“We’ve really come to love it,” Scheidegger says, chatting after a Sunday win. “We’re hard to miss. We’re trying to embrace it as much as possible… I love how Dynasty is trying to push the boundaries a little bit, and bring some really stylish, different-looking material and jackets to the curling atmosphere.” 

So that’s what fans see on the ice. What they don’t see is how it took a village to make it all happen. Dynasty had mere weeks to manufacture dozens of uniforms at its partner facility in Winnipeg, between the playdowns and the Scotties; and then, there were last-minute revisions. 

In all this commotion, it helps to have friends.

Some Scotties uniforms needed to be remade at the last minute, so Dynasty enlisted the help of Jill Officer’s husband, Devlin Hinchey, who brought a shipment of uniforms with him when he flew from Winnipeg to Sydney on Saturday night. 

“People help us all the time, because there’s only so much we can personally do,” says Hodgson, who has done some urgent deliveries of his own. “We’re not as big of a company as some people think… At the start of a year, I always have to fly an extra bag or two (of uniforms) to the first slam. Sometimes, three bags.” 

Hey, that’s curling for you. It’s not just the sport on the ice. It’s also a tight-knit community, an extended family of people whose paths cross at bonspiels from Sapporo to Sydney. It’s in that friendly culture that Hodgson sees new opportunities to evolve not just curling uniforms, but the fan culture itself. 

The company already sells its own line of Dynasty Curling swag and $159.99 official team jackets, exact replicas of the ones teams like Sweden’s Niklas Edin wear on the ice. But imagine, Hodgson says, if you could buy a broader range of affordable merch: Team Homan hoodies, for instance, or Carruthers-branded caps.

That’s not just a salesperson talking. The dream, Hodgson thinks, is one day to see the audience at live events resplendent in team colours. It’s sort of like that whenever the Scotties or Brier land in Saskatchewan, and fans swaddle themselves in iconic Rider green.

How much of a boon would it be for the evolution of curling culture, if that colourful spirit could spread? 

“The way the sport’s going, for it to exist, we’re going to need a change in culture,” he says.

“If you look at the demographics of who’s watching, the age is high. We need to jazz it up and find ways to get a new, younger demographic of people who will be supporting it for a long time. A good way to do that is apparel.” 

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca