There’s a version of competitive curling that people see: the sheet, the sweeping, the shot making.

Then there’s the version that happens in group chats at 11pm, in shared spreadsheets, and in email threads with logo files attached. Less glamorous but just as necessary.

Here’s a look at that side of it.

 

It adds up fast

A season on the road is expensive. The obvious costs are the ones you’d expect — gas, hotels, food, entry fees — and they stack up quickly when you’re travelling most weekends through the fall and winter.

Then there are the costs people don’t think about. Equipment doesn’t last forever, and broom heads in particular get swapped out during events – sometimes even after a single game. As a team, we can easily go through 100+ broom heads in one season.

There’s also the cost of time away from work. Whether you’re using vacation days or taking unpaid time off to travel and compete, there is a real financial cost that doesn’t show up on a receipt.

And beyond the travel and equipment, there are the investments we make to help our team perform at the highest level. Coaching, sport psychology, fitness and training, media, marketing and other team expenses all play an important role in supporting a competitive season.

This is exactly why sponsorship matters so much. Sponsors don’t just help a team look sharp — they knock down the financial barriers that would otherwise stop athletes from chasing their dreams in amateur sports. Plenty of talented curlers step away from the competitive game not because they can’t play, but because the opportunity cost is too high. Sponsorship is what keeps that door open.

 

Finding sponsors

The first thing to understand is that you’re not asking for a favour. You’re offering something.

A competitive team is a small, visible, well-liked marketing vehicle. You’re at events most weekends. You’re streamed. You’re on social media. You’re in your community, and curling communities are loyal in a way that most audiences simply aren’t. When you walk into a conversation with a potential sponsor knowing what you can actually offer them, the whole tone changes.

A few things that help:

Start local, and start with people who already know you. The businesses that say yes first are usually ones with an existing connection to the club, the sport, or someone on the team.

Have tiers, and be clear about them. Platinum, gold, silver, whatever you want to call them — each level should come with a defined set of benefits: logo size and placement on the jackets, social media mentions, appearances, event presence. Nobody wants to guess what they’re buying.

Put it in writing. A simple one-page package with your team bio, results, reach, and sponsorship levels does an enormous amount of work for you. It also makes you look like a team that has its act together, which is exactly the impression you want.

Follow through all season. Tag them. Thank them. Send them a photo of the jackets. Invite them to an event. A sponsor who feels seen is a sponsor who renews — and renewals are so much easier than starting over every September.

 

Managing team finances

This one is unglamorous and completely essential.

You need a clear picture of where the team’s money sits at any given point in the season — not a vague sense, an actual number. We’ve found the simplest approach works best: a shared Excel file that tracks expenses, both current and projected.

The projected column is the one that saves you. Knowing what you’ve already spent is useful. Knowing what January is going to cost you, in September, is what lets you make good decisions.

It also removes a lot of potential awkwardness. When everyone can see the same file, nobody’s wondering who paid for what or whether things are balanced. Four people, one source of truth.

 

Designing team apparel

Everyone wants to look sharp out there. So how does it actually come together?

The first step happens well before anyone opens a design program: you need your sponsors for the season locked in. Specifically, you need to know what level each one is coming in at, where that entitles them to placement, and you need proper logo files from each of them — usually an SVG — to hand to the design company.

From there, you’re working with one of the companies that specializes in curling apparel and team jackets. It’s worth using them rather than a generic printer. They’ve worked with teams for years, they understand logo placement on a curling jacket specifically, and they have designers on hand who’ve solved these problems before.

Two things we’ve learned

1. Build the design around your platinum sponsor.

The hardest part of a curling jacket is that you’re combining a bunch of unrelated logos into one garment and having a somewhat cohesive colour scheme. The fix we keep coming back to: pull a design element or pattern directly from your top sponsor and use it as the foundation.

For our 2024/25 jackets, Montana’s BBQ and Bar was our main sponsor, so we took the black wood pattern that runs through their website and used it as the backdrop for the entire jacket. It’s subtle — most people wouldn’t consciously recognize it — but it gave the jacket depth and texture instead of a flat black background, and it quietly reinforced Montana’s throughout the whole design.

We did the same thing for our 2025-27 jackets with 99 Bottles. We built a repeating pattern out of the 99 Bottles font and used that as the background.

Both times, the result was a jacket that felt designed rather than assembled.

2. Commit to one or two colours.

Pull one or two main colours that work across your sponsor logos and hold the line on them. Every additional colour makes the whole thing noisier, and noise is the enemy when you’ve got this many logos to accommodate. A tight palette makes a busy jacket read as intentional.

 

The unglamorous stuff is the foundation

None of this shows up on a line score. Nobody’s tracking your spreadsheet percentage.

But sponsorship is what gets you to the event, the finances are what keep you going all season, and the jacket is what people remember you in. Get this side right and the curling gets a whole lot easier to focus on.