Rachel Homan celebrates winning the championship belt at the Grand Slam of Karaoke during the Grand Slam of Curling in St. John’s, NL on Nov. 30, 2024.Anil Mungal/Supplied
About seven years ago, when Jennifer Jones’s daughter Isabella was in kindergarten and her teachers and other adults would ask what she wanted to be when she grew up, she’d say she hoped to be a curler, just like her mom.
“Back then, I thought – well, you know, that’s amazing, but there’s really no profession in curling,” said Jones, the 2014 Olympic gold medalist and two-time world champion, during an interview on Wednesday. “In all my years of curling, you dream of having a professional league.”
It’s too late for Jones, who announced her retirement last year, but on Thursday her dreams for her daughter may begin to come to fruition with the announcement that The Curling Group, a Toronto-based startup backed by deep-pocketed investors and some high-profile ambassadors from other pro sports, will launch the world’s first global curling league in the spring of 2026.
The Rock League will feature six mixed-gender teams of 10 players each: two from Canada, captained by Rachel Homan and Brad Jacobs; two from Europe (Scotland’s Bruce Mouat and Switzerland’s Alina Paetz); and one each from the U.S. (Korey Dropkin) and the Asia Pacific region (Japan’s Chinami Yoshida).
It will launch next April, after the 2026 Winter Olympics and World Curling Championships, with an initial six-week season, with events in Canada, the U.S., and Europe.
The full team rosters and competition formats are still in development under Jones and John Morris, another decorated retired curler who is, like Jones, working as a strategic adviser to The Curling Group (TCG).
“It’s a dream come true for all of us,” said Jacobs. Though he, too, was a gold medalist in 2014 and spends much of his winters on Canadian TV screens throwing rocks and sweeping up trophies, like most curlers Jacobs needs to hold down a full-time job. (He’s an agent with World Financial Group.)
“It’s still an amateur sport. We’re funded [by the government] and we play for prize money and the better we do, the more prize money we can put in our pockets to help pay our bills and put shelter over our family’s heads, some clothes on our back and some food in our mouth.” But, he added, “we’re not making millions and millions of dollars like other professional athletes out there.”
The league is the boldest move yet by TCG after its purchase of the Grand Slam of Curling in April, 2024, from Rogers Communications Inc.’s Sportsnet, which had operated the five-event circuit since 2012. Nic Sulsky, a former daily fantasy and sports betting executive, had founded TCG earlier in the year with the sports business executive Mike Cotton, backed by the Toronto-based venture capital firm Relay Ventures. In September, the company announced it had secured U.S. $5-million in seed funding.
After purchasing the Grand Slam, TCG set out to shake up a sport that some felt hadn’t evolved much with the times.
“Curling was dying,” said Sulsky, TCG’s CEO, in an interview, noting that the sport is primarily overseen across the world by not-for-profit national associations such as Curling Canada, whose mandates are usually focused on grassroots development rather than commercialization.
“The energy around the sport was dwindling at a time when the energies around other sports were exploding,” he said.
“There wasn’t a lot of money in the sport of curling, and that’s what’s needed to help build and innovate, especially these days when there’s a proliferation of other sports that are getting headlines. Here is a historic global Olympic sport that was starting to get overcome by sports that had just been invented over the last four or five years.”
Since assuming control of the Grand Slam, Sulsky has supercharged the ability for fans to access the games, launching an app and global streaming options as well as securing distribution with foreign broadcasters such as BBC (on its iPlayer) and the Japanese streamer Abema.
And Sulsky is focused on making content to help curlers become stars. Earlier this month, the company brought on the CBC sportscaster Devin Heroux as head of content and chief correspondent.
Last fall, it launched the Grand Slam of Karaoke, taking place each of the Saturday nights of the Grand Slams of Curling, where the curlers go from competing on the ice sheets to singing side-by-side with hundreds of well lubricated fans in a hotel conference room. Last December, Homan snagged top prize – a WWE-style championship wrestling belt – for performing the rap by Queen Pen in Blackstreet’s No Diggity.
Earlier this month, it kicked off the final Grand Slam event of the season, at Toronto’s Mattamy Athletic Centre, with a sold-out one-time Battle of the Sexes charity fundraiser between Homan and Mouat. It featured thunderous musical introductions, players sliding out of a tunnel onto the ice, and a break in the middle of the game during which the players enjoyed some gourmet canned tuna courtesy of that evening’s title sponsor, Rio Mare.
Some traditionally minded fans have grumbled about the changes.
Sulsky is sympathetic, but he believes the sport needs to evolve it if’s going to survive.
“If you love the curlers – who are excited about what we’re doing – you need to open your mind up a little bit to the fact that we’re going to respect the sport of curling, we’re just going to put a new package on it.”
Last week, Sulsky and a handful of the circuit’s top curlers flew to Nashville to stage an All-Star event, filming the athletes in and around the city for a two-hour special that will include George Kittle of the San Francisco 49ers, who played in the pro-am event; the former NFL star Jared Allen is also part of The Curling Group.
“We need to grow this thing, and that’s going to showcase the sport in a way that it’s never been showcased before. The personalities of these curlers is going to just scream off the TV,” said Sulsky. “If we want to build a star system for the sport, we have to build stars, and it’s events like this that are going to help do it.”