Cedar Rapids To Host the Cream of the Curling Crop in 2022

Ladies and gentlemen, start your curling irons! Wait, not THAT kind of curling. The ever-popular and growing sport of curling is bringing its men's AND women's championships to Cedar Rapids in 2022.

What is curling?

It is sort of like shuffleboard meets croquet...with a shot put disk, on ice. Here's how Wikipedia defines it: "a sport in which players slide stones on a sheet of ice toward a target area which is segmented into four concentric circles. It is related to bowls, boules, and shuffleboard". This intriguing sport will crown its national champions January 2-9, 2022 at ImOn Ice Arena, known also as "The Stable" or the home of the Cedar Rapids RoughRiders.

KCRG says the winners of the 2022 Men’s and Women’s National Curling Championships will advance to represent the United States at the 2022 World Championships.

Winners in Cedar Rapids will be the faces of U.S. Curling against the world

Phil Drobnick is the director of Men's and mixed doubles curling, and made a statement saying "the National Championships have been scheduled for early January so that the Olympic Teams have the opportunity to compete, as well as allow the National Champions ample time to train before the World Championships".

Curling will also be an event at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing next February and Drobnick along with other officials like local Cedar Rapids curling President Phil Burian hope the national spotlight on it here in Cedar Rapids will help gain more interest in the sport before the Winter Games.

The event was supposed to be here this year, too

The national championships were set to be played in Cedar Rapids in early 2021,  but were relocated this year due to the pandemic and the unprecedented derecho damage caused to ImOn Ice Arena.