A broken chiller, which makes the ice, caused Saturday’s Katy’s Courage fund-raiser at the Buckskill Winter Club to be postponed a week, though thanks to a prompt repair skaters soon after were circling the rink, and curling students were practicing sliding deliveries on a surface that, while not of ice show caliber, sufficed.
Thus the all-day event that is to raise money for the Katy’s Courage Foundation, established a decade ago in memory of Jim and Brigid Stewart’s daughter, who died of a rare pediatric cancer at the age of 12, will be held Saturday, beginning with a parents and kids hockey game from 10:30 a.m. to noon. There will be an ice show from 6:30 to 7:30, in which Ice Theatre of New York professionals, including several on Buckskill’s staff, are to perform, followed by a raffle drawing and an adult hockey game.
The foundation provides scholarships to high school seniors here, funds bereavement counseling, and supports pediatric cancer research.
Figure skating and hockey have been staples at Buckskill for a number of years now, though curling lessons were added this winter, lessons that originally were to have been given by the Long Island Curling Club of Syosset. Facing a hefty charge for the service, however, Doug De Groot, who, with his wife, Kathryn, owns the tennis and skating club, turned to his head tennis professional, Carlos La Riva. When asked, the native of Venezuela replied, according to De Groot, “I was born to curl.”
“We’ve been sold out every week — I’ve even had repeaters,” La Riva said before Saturday’s 4 p.m. session, which was put off for 20 minutes so the 15-by-150-foot curling “sheet” could be sprayed with hot-water “bubbles” that the four-person curling team’s sweepers can disperse as a delivered granite “stone” heads toward “the house,” a circular target with a bull’s-eye at the sheet’s far end.
The house being covered with water on Saturday, La Riva and his five students — Liz Carey, Gretchen Werwaiss, Jenny Landey, and Ethan Reed and Ashley Chang, newlyweds who had come out from Queens for the weekend — concentrated on delivering the stones, which, as all found out, was no easy thing.
Balance, strength, and concentration, with the goal of control, were uppermost when it comes to the ancient Scottish sport, said La Riva, whose immersion in curling’s rules and strategies has made him a fan, so much so that his fellow Buckskill staffers have come to call him Curlos.
“It’s like chess on ice — it’s really cool,” he told the five clinic-takers.
In delivering the stone, a right-handed curler must push hard with his or her right foot off the “hack,” curling’s equivalent to the blocks in track, while allowing the left foot, which has been trailing atop an insert-shaped “slider” to come through smoothly so that when delivered the left knee is bent and the right leg is trailing close to the ice.
Buckskill’s students are also provided with a “stabilizer” that right-handers hold in their left hands so they can better maintain their balance.
It was the second curling lesson for Carey, who later acknowledged that curling was “much more strategic than I thought. . . . It’s such a good idea. So many of my friends who saw an Instagram posting of mine want to try it. It’s a sport anyone can do — you don’t have to be superathletic. The interest is definitely there — it’s growing.”
Carey said Landey, who swayed onto her side in her first try, “wound up with the best throw of the day . . . by far. She was the stealth champion. I told her Swiss Miss was going to sponsor her.”
Landey, asked later what she was feeling when delivering her first stone, said, “I was feeling a little overwhelmed. But I improved very quickly, at least when it came to distance and accuracy, though not necessarily form.”
There were “so many layers” to the game, she said, adding that she agreed with Carey that it was a sport anyone could do. “I’m high on curling — I’m going to order my own shoes,” she said.
When told that De Groot would like to set aside one night of the week for curling next winter, with four sheets across the N.H.L.-regulation rink, Landey, whose long throw had scored a point for her team, which included La Riva and Werwaiss (Carey, Reed, and Chang comprising the other), said “that would be amazing. It’s nice to think we’re pioneers in this experiment.”