Curling is a pretty good way to spend your winter. Like anything social, though, it builds a culture around it, along with a set of unwritten rules of etiquette. Some of it is weirdly regional¹, but a lot of it is common sense.

One big no-no, that feels like common sense to me, anyway, is that you should never visibly celebrate a missed shot² by your opponent.

I volunter helping teach adults learn to curl at my club, and after the practice/games we occasionally give presentations on off-ice topics. This rule, not celebrating an opponent's miss, gets a bullet point on the etiquette slide show. I guess it's just my personality, but I would have thought this rule goes without saying because I can't imagine³.

There is also another bit of curling culture which is the allure of the "eight-ender". An end of curling is like an inning of baseball. Each team throws eight rocks per end. Therefore, in theory, the maximum a team can score in one end is eight points. If your team manages to achieve this, it is a Big Deal. You will definitely be celebrating. If you browse the walls of some clubs, you can see delightful photos of four young adults in the prime of their life circa 1984, who may or may not be dead by now, posing over a photo of the end state of the end, grinning ear to ear, memorialized forever in yellowing photoprint next to a dartboard or water cooler at their club.

But here's the thing. To score eight points in one end of curling requires not only skill and luck, but also it absolutely requires a very large degree of incompetence on the part of your opponent. If you are dancing up and down on the ice because you pulled off the equivalent of bowling 300, you are one-hundred-percent doing a touchdown dance in front of a team that has basically collectively shit the bed eight times in a row.

Just one of those things.

(But seriously, don't celebrate an opponent's miss. Also, even when you yourself make a good shot, or even a great one: act like you've been there before. No, this isn't baseball, where you might have to wear a 95 fastball into your butt. But you curl at a club and let me tell you, people talk.)

1. I was thrown off playing my first games in western Canada when, not only did the winners not buy the losers the first round of drinks, but they seemed to actively not want to socialize with our team after. And I'm pretty sure it's not because we weren't fun to hang around with? ↩

2. OK fine, I guess if like you are winning Olympic gold because of the miss then maybe do a fist pump or something, I'll allow it. I'm a club curler talking about club curling here. ↩

3. This post was actually prompted by finding out that a friend recently had this happen to her, after she ended up heavy on her last draw, allowing the other team to sweep her far enough back that they stole two points, and then proceeded to cheer and clap and high five. I certainly have never once seen anything like this happen. ↩