Ida Fracasso lowers herself into the hack and concentrates on her shot.

At the opposite end of the sheet of ice, Ann LaFontaine, Fracasso’s captain — her skip, in curling lingo — raises a small pair of binoculars to her face.

Fracasso slides out and releases her rock. It rumbles down the sheet with the soft roar of granite on ice, bearing down on an opponent’s stone, colliding with a sharp crack.

“That’s the sound you’re waiting for,” Fracasso says, triumphant.

That sound is everything to Fracasso, because she cannot see the shot she just made.

Fracasso is blind. She is playing with the Toronto Blind Curling Club, a group of about a dozen visually impaired players who have just started the season at the Royal Canadian Curling Club.

Kikuye Inouye, a volunteer coach with the league, is not visually impaired — “although my skip calls me that sometimes,” Inouye jokes.

She joined the group two years ago to help train new curlers, as most had never played the sport before.

“The learning curve for me was figuring out what each person can see individually,” Inouye said.

There is no one-size-fits-all definition of visual impairment, and the players in the league have a range of abilities — some lack peripheral vision, others are almost completely blind.

Two of the curlers are deaf as well as visually impaired, including Taras Kuzminski. He had never played the sport before, but had seen it on TV before he lost his sight.

On the ice, Kuzminski is accompanied by an “intervener,” who explains the shots to him using sign language and guides Kuzminski when he is sweeping by running along behind him with a broom on his shoulder, helping him keep pace with the moving rock.

“It’s almost a little comical,” LaFontaine says. “But it works.”

Fully-sighted guides are also on the ice to aid the other curlers.

Curling is a game of communication, relying on shouts to relay commands — all those screams of “Hurry hard!” serve a purpose. With blind curling, communication becomes even more essential.

As skip, LaFontaine has to explain the shot she wants from one end of the ice to the other using hand signals.

“I have to communicate that to the guide, and the guide has to communicate that to the shooter and to the sweepers,” LaFontaine says.

And as the rock thunders down the ice toward her, the sweepers running alongside have to shout what direction it’s heading in because she can’t see the oncoming stone until it has almost reached her.

In April, the club will host the blind curling provincial championships. There are eight cities in Ontario with blind curling leagues, and they play off every year for the right to represent the province in Ottawa at the national championship.

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In addition to all the usual logistics of organizing a tournament, the blind championship brings extra challenges, such as arranging transportation between the hotel and the club because the players cannot drive themselves.

Club members have been fundraising to support the league, selling chocolate and even holding a golf tournament — curling is not the only blind sport in Toronto. During the curling off-season, Kuzminski stays active with dragon boat racing and tandem cycling.

Back on the ice, 59-year-old Fracasso says she intends to keep curling for as long as she can.

“It’s a game you can pick back up again,” Fracasso says. “It’s a game for life.”