Bemidji Curling Club

About Bemidji Curling Club

Bemidji Curling Club: Home of America’s First Olympic Curling Medal

Bemidji Curling Club was organized at a Sunday afternoon meeting on January 13, 1935, three years after curlers from Hibbing staged a demonstration in town. Its first home was a single sheet, and later that year the club moved into a WPA-built sports arena at 7th and America, growing to four sheets by the late 1950s. Women were admitted as members in 1951. When the arena site was taken for housing in 1967, members helped fund the club’s present building on 23rd Street NW, which gained a kitchen and locker rooms in 1979 and today holds six sheets of dedicated curling ice.

Few American clubs can match Bemidji’s record. Scott Baird’s rink won the 1979 national championship and played at the Silver Broom, and two Bemidji teams reached the 1987-88 Olympic Trials. At the 2006 Turin Olympics, Pete Fenson’s Bemidji rink won bronze, the first Olympic curling medal for the United States, while Cassandra Johnson’s team had finished second at the 2005 World Women’s Championship. The club has also hosted the 1980 Men’s Nationals, 1984 Mixed Nationals and 1991 Junior Championships.

Today the club runs league divisions for different skill levels, a junior program, community education classes for beginners and bonspiels through the season, streams games on YouTube and is raising funds through its Continuing A Legacy campaign.