No matter what happens, don’t run on the ice. If you fall on your back, remember to put your chin down to avoid hitting your head.

Along those lines, while you don’t have to wear a helmet, it’s “highly recommended.”

After such surprisingly ominous warnings — as well as a signed waiver and release of liability for potentially “severe” injury — a group of bluegrass newbies, myself included, were introduced to a non-contact winter sport, once obscure in America but growing in popularity.

It’s time to curl, Louisville. If you dare.

The Derby City Curling Club has taken root in recent weeks, holding introductory learn-to-curl classes at the Alpine Ice Arena on Gardiner Lane in the hopes of developing a roster of paying members in the coming months. Bethaney Curry, a retired competitive wheelchair fencer from Bowling Green, started the club this year. She was both looking for something she could do with her husband and a sport that could possibly provide her an avenue onto the U.S. Paralympic Team in eight years.

“I started a club without any curling experience,” Curry said. “I wanted to bring a community together of curlers, make new friends and just have fun.”

The response has been overwhelming. The club’s 24-person introductory learn-to-curl classes, typically held on Thursday nights, are sold out through February.

As for the sport of itself? “It’s harder than it looks,” Curry said.

Indeed.

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John Shuster was in sixth grade when he threw his first curling rock.

He had basically grown up around the sport in Chisholm, Minnesota, because his father played in a men’s league, “but it wasn’t by any means a popular thing to do,” Shuster said. And it wasn’t until he was on the ice himself in a Sunday night junior curling session that he knew it was for him.

“In that two-hour session I was there, I really wanted to see if I could do this,” Shuster said. “And because of maybe my familiarity with what it looked like and I really wanted to be there — and maybe some of the kids that were there didn’t want to be there quite as badly — I think by the time I left there I was probably as good as half the kids that had been there.”

Few in the world, if anyone, is better than Shuster these days.

Now 36 years old, Shuster has been the face of American curling for years. The skipper (lead position) for the past three United States Olympic squads, Shuster led his four-man team to a 2018 gold medal in PyeongChang, a victory that went down as a pivotal moment for curling in his home country.

Since that point, Shuster and the other three gold-medal curlers have attained widespread celebrity in a sport which has been receiving mild attention every four years when the Olympics rolled around.

Prior to 2018, however, Shuster’s USA teams had largely struggled in the Olympics despite having proven themselves in other major international events.

“The Olympics were kind of the outliers, but the world doesn’t really know that,” Shuster said. “There was definitely some pride, because us as competitive curlers in our country have worked extremely hard over the last decade to get to a position where we could challenge for medals and for gold. And we hadn’t shown that yet. That was very, very important.”

While curling has seen more television time in recent years through NBC, the sport appears to be approaching a relative boom in the United States thanks in large part to the 2018 Olympics.

The gold-medal game gave the United States its signature curling moment, a dramatic shot by Shuster in which he knocked two of Sweden’s stones out to give Team USA a whopping five points in the game’s eighth end (think innings in baseball, only there are 10 of them) of an eventual 10-7 victory.

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“America always embraces winners” Shuster said. “But even in the last two Olympics, there’s been growth … through curling clubs popping up all over the country. There’s not only the arena curling clubs like the one down in Louisville happening, but there’s also arena curling clubs that are making their way on to dedicated ice.

“It’s happening more and more in the South, which is very interesting, like at Louisville. Charlotte has dedicated ice. Greenville, South Carolina, is an arena club that’s getting dedicated ice. Los Angeles is getting dedicated ice. That for sure is the sign of growth in curling happening.”

Rick Patzke, CEO of USA Curling, traced the growth of the sport in the United States to the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City.

“The television exposure during the Olympics has driven interest and then growth across the country,” Patzke said. “Prior to 2002, we maybe had less than 10,000 members and probably 125 curling clubs, primarily in the cold-weather, northern-tier part of the country. Today, it’s close to 180 clubs in 44 states, and I think 23,500 members.”

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I did, in fact, survive my first curling experience with little more than a few bruises, as was the case for the rest of the students in my class.

However, if you’ve ever seen curling on television — the smooth delivery, a curler crouching low for a perfectly balanced and effortless glide on the ice, delicately positioning a stone just so before releasing it to the bulls-eye (or “house”) — this was definitely not that.

My best delivery consisted of short, awkward tumble rather than long glide, during which I managed to stay upright long enough to crudely shove a stone toward the other end of the ice. It started way off target to the right, but for whatever reason, it began turning (or curling) to the left.

With sweepers helping it on the other end, my stone somehow ended up on the outskirts of the “button,” which is the inner ring inside of the larger one in curling’s “house.”

Fist-bumps and praise.

Oh yeah, no sweat. Totally meant to do that.

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Similar scenes played out on the surrounding lanes, both the thrill of beginner’s luck and the agony of falling in embarrassment in front of an ice rink full of strangers.

“I stuck the landing!” exclaimed Cristina Fetter of Louisville after an early stumble in her curling class.

“It was scary at first,” Fetter said later. “My first two times, I fell. Toward the end, we were all getting it in the house.”

Fetter, who said she loved her first curling experience, was interested after watching the sport during the Olympics. The same goes for Louisville’s Mike Sheehy, who heard about the learn-to-curl classes from a co-worker and attended alongside Shannon Siders.

“It’s really user-friendly, I guess, to how they help teach you,” Siders said. “I didn’t fall too many times.”

And Curry’s ambition to start the club, in a sense, can also be traced back to Shuster’s victory in the Olympics.

“I’ve been a fan for the sport for a couple of years now,” she said. “When they won the Olympics this year, I was really excited. I wanted to learn to curl, and I didn’t want to move to learn to curl.”

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Kentucky’s lone curling club was born this year with plenty of help. There was USA Curling, for example, which provided the equipment. A full set of stones for multiple games at once can cost upwards of $30,000, for instance, and there are also curling brooms and other items.

“It’s a pretty excited group,” Patzke said of Curry and the Derby City Curling Club. “They’re doing a great job there getting things going.”

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Then there was Andrew Mackay and Karen Gerstner. A Canadian with a couple of decades of curling experience, Mackay moved to Louisville for work about four years ago and searched unsuccessfully for a curling club. Gerstner arrived from Minnesota this past summer.

Upon learning about the new curling club, each reached out to Curry to help get it off the ground by helping teach the learn-to-curl classes.

“Our goal is teaching these people,” Gerstner said, “... the more people that we get in these learn-to-curl classes, the more people that we get out on the ice, then we can start playing leagues.”

“It’s fun to watch how people progress very quickly,” Mackay said, “and the end result, it’s not impossible to achieve a very good result very, very quickly. … To just enjoy the game, it takes about 15 to 20 minutes.”

It also takes dedication. After a recent class, Mackay and Gerstner stayed late to load equipment, including surprisingly heavy stones (the intensity of the loud, hollow, echoing "thock" when one strikes another on the ice is understated by television). Gerstner chuckled while doing so, “The fact that I’m doing all this, I must be really excited.”

“Considering nobody was paid for any of this,” Mackay said with a laugh. “It’s a volunteer thing, because you know what you’re going for. You’re trying to create the possibility.”

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Near the end of a conversation with the most famous curler in the United States, I was asked by Shuster if I’d be back with the Derby City Curling Club.

I didn’t know what to say. Truth is, yeah, probably.

It was fun, even though I wasn’t very good at it, and as Shuster himself noted, “If you have some athletic ability, and I’ve seen it before, you can get at least acceptably good pretty quickly.”

The Derby City Curling Club is offering $200 memberships through its website, derbycitycurlingclub.com. Basically, members will get ice time each Thursday for pick-up games or just to practice. Curry said her husband has a goal of 100 members this first winter.

Meanwhile, on his end, Shuster takes note of what is happening in places like Louisville, and he said it will remain a priority to grow the sport in the United States.

“I just think the sport and its traditions bring out the best in people,” he said. “I just love spreading our game because of that, more than anything.”

Gentry Estes: 502-582-4205; gestes@courierjournal.com; Twitter: @Gentry_Estes. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/gentrye.

DERBY CITY CURLING CLUB

The Derby City Curling Club offers $200 memberships through its website, derbycitycurlingclub.com. Members get ice time each Thursday for pick-up games or just to practice.