Partnering with the Fairbanks Curling Club, AGC hosted its first-ever bonspiel, a multi-game curling tournament that drew sixteen four-person teams and a crowd of spectators. While nearly all players were new to curling, they quickly got the hang of the sport.

“It was a lot of fun seeing them get out there and get their bearings on the ice, especially in the first round,” Maguire reports. “By the third round, everyone was a pro.”

About twenty players leveled up their curling skills a week before the main event. On January 19, AGC hosted a free Learn to Curl session at the Fairbanks Curling Club. Longtime curler and employee at Fairbanks construction company Great Northwest, Inc. Tony Johansen was on hand to teach newbies the basics of the game.

Players learned to fill the four roles of a curling team: lead, second, third, and “skip”—the athlete responsible for managing the game and deciding their team’s strategy.

“It takes some practice when you’re a new curler, being able to move fast down the ice while also sweeping the rock,” Johansen explains, referring to the granite stone curlers slide toward a target, or “house,” in order to score.

Six volunteers taught the attendees of the Learn to Curl, showing them how to maintain footing on the ice and giving them an opportunity to throw stones for the first time.

Johansen, who has been curling for about fifty-seven years, was excited to teach the newcomers and to help host the AGC event. He says he hoped that the fundraiser would introduce people to this family-friendly sport and attract some new members to Fairbanks’s curling club.

“I was also hoping it would expose people in a favorable way to curling, and I think it did that,” he said. “People stayed around afterwards and some of them went out on the ice just to throw rocks and have a good time.”

The day of the bonspiel unfolded ominously: rain the day before had ground Fairbanks to a halt and the members of the event committee found themselves making a tough call. In the end, they decided to proceed with the curling competition, not knowing whether anyone would show up.

They did. Curlers came out to compete, and then a crowd of spectators arrived.

“Fairbanks always shows up, and I can’t appreciate that more,” Maguire says. “Teams went up to the mezzanine during their bye rounds and socialized and talked—which is the other goal of this event, to provide an opportunity for our members to get out there and shake some hands and meet people that they maybe have only communicated with via email—to put a face to a name. Especially up here in the Interior, it’s a really tight-knit community, and those connections are important.”

She adds that the annual get-together provides an opportunity for employees to get out of the office and bond in a unique way; some companies, she says, purchase team slots as a team-building opportunity for their staff.

At the event, additional funding was raised through a 50/50 raffle, which offered a selection of prizes supplied by generous donors.

Based on the success of this year’s event, Maguire said plans are looking good for another bonspiel next year.

“People just had a really good time, and I think once they got out there and took the apprehension away from trying something new, they were able to cut loose,” she says.