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PHOTOS: COURTESY OF GENOVEVA CHAVEZ COMMUNITY CENTER SWEEPING by TOM MILLER, Ice Arena Manager, Genoveva Chavez Community Center E very four years the Olympic Winter Games take place. During that stretch of elite athleticism, I receive numerous inquiries about curling at Genoveva Chavez Community Center in Santa Fe. "Can we do this? Can we bring curling to Santa Fe? How do we get started?" In the spring of 2013, I asked the Denver Curling Club to come down to Santa Fe and assist us with a curling open house that August. We had 170 people attend the open house, so we scheduled a second open house for March 2014, in which 204 people attended. With this level of interest, we installed two curling sheets during our annual ice removal/install that August. We now had the curling sheets. The next step was to acquire the Denver Curling Club's stones and basic curling equipment to allow us to launch our program. We purchased 32 stones along with brooms and sliders. In October 2014, we purchased the hacks and pebbling equipment and were now ready to begin our curling program. On Oct. 22, 2014, we offered our first lunchtime drop-in curling session, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., which we still hold weekly. We've also taught two learn-to- curl sessions with 14 people in each class. Since curling is completely new to our ice arena and staff, we took many notes from the Denver Curling Club on how to prep the ice and run the curling programs. Their expertise was invaluable. Our staff performs a resurface at least four hours before our curling program begins. They also place the stones in large plastic containers that have the snow in the bottom and a sheet of plastic for the stones to sit on. Stones cannot sit in water, as they will get ruined. Prepping our "arena ice" for curling consists of a dry cut and a light flood from the ice resurfacer. While the water is freezing, we have two staff members place the curling stones along the dasher boards to help them begin to chill down. Within an hour, the stones match the ice SWEEPING How a popular curling program began in New Mexico ANTICIPATED REVENUE FROM THE MARCH TO OCTOBER 2015 SEASON WILL BE $13,000. 36 / MARCH.APRIL.2015 RINKMAGAZINE.COM in Santa Fe , Don't let your stones sit in water or they'll get ruined.