The Team
The team consists of four players, called the 'Skip' the 'First', the 'Second', and the 'Third'. Terribly imaginative.

	2000 Ladies World Champions Canada

The Skip is essentially the team captain -- generally the most experienced, well-tempered person on the team. Play rotates so that all four team members get to deliver two stones each. At any time, there is one skip, two sweepers, and one person delivering a stone.

Everyone gets to throw 2 stones and sweep, so it is a totally involved team game.

When the Skip is scheduled to deliver his stones, the 'third' (so called because he is the third in line to deliver stones) acts temporarily as skip. From this, we can pretty much guess that the later stones are more important to the outcome of the game. Sweeping is directed by the skip, and the type of shot, as well as the placement of the shot, is called by the skip (or acting Skip).

The Strategy of the Game
Curling is always mentioned as a game of strategy by curlers, partly because it is, but also probably because they want to make sure that it's seen as more than throwing rocks and slipping around on the ice.

Strategy is definitely the big thing in competitive curling, though. A great deal of effort goes into planning an end so your team's stone ends up closest to the center. There are a bunch of different strategic moves, and here we show the standards:

The Draw A 'Draw' is obviously the most basic move. You send the stone down the sheet, and with the help of the sweepers and the direction of the skip, you somehow get the stone to stop where you want it. Here is shown a perfect draw into the Tee, the center of the House. This would be fairly pointless as a first shot, as it could easily be taken out.
The Takeout Here, the green stone is taken out by the yellow. The yellow continues on, maintaining most of its momentum (usually takeouts are thrown harder than draws), while also knocking the green stone out of play. The yellow stone could, of course, remain in play if it remained in bounds, but in a basic takeout, the only concern is removing the other team's stone.
Guarding Guarding is, as its name implies, placing a stone in front of another (with a draw) to prevent a takeout. In this diagram, we see two green stones and three yellow stones that have already been played. To protect stone A, the yellow team has sent a draw, stone B, immediately in front of A. This prevents a takeout by stone C as would have happened here.

Ice-man "pebbles" before the next game

The Ice
A large element of the game not mentioned so far is the 'curl' of the stone. As you can see in the above diagrams, the stone is not coming in on a perfectly straight path. This is due to the curl put on the stone by the curler. As the stone is delivered, a slight spin is put on it, acting like a very, very slow curveball.

The pebble is what helps the stone pick up the lateral motion. As is seen below, the ice is sprinkled before the game with a 'pebbler', which creates a small bumpy effect on the ice, much like little pebbles, see diagram on the left. Without the pebble, the stone would not be able to travel as far. The small travelling surface of the stone itself combined with the small contact area of the ice (created by the pebble) creates the same effect you get when you brake on an ice patch. A thin film of water on top of ice creates a hydroplane. Using brooms, the sweepers slightly warm the pebble and thereby increase this effect, causing the stone to glide farther and grip less (which also has the effect of lessening the lateral motion due to curl).

The Equipment

The footwear used by curlers is essentially a very specialized form of training shoe; one shoe has a very ‘slippery’ sole, made from thick Teflon and the other shoe has a ‘grippy’ sole made in natural crepe rubber. Today the ‘slippy’ sole has been re-designed to give an even weight distribution over the width of the foot to make a steadier delivery position.

2 Juniors Sweeping

The ‘sweepers’ use brushes made from hoghair (see top picture) or modern fabric (see bottom picture) to make the running stones travel further and in doing so can prevent the stone from ‘curling’ too much. The sweepers respond to the encouragement of the team skip to really pull out all the stops to help the stone finish in the ideal position. The 2 sweepers do the sweeping, normally 1 on each side of the stone, and always in front of it.

Teams in International competition dress according to their national bodies’ codes of dress; but curling clothing has to be warm and loose fitting. But don’t think you get cold playing, the sweepers can work up a good sweat by the effort they have to exert to keep the stone on line. So ideally curling uniforms are multi-layered.

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