The Curling Group Puts On Inaugural Curling All-Star Game in Nashville

The Curling Group Puts On Inaugural Curling All-Star Game in Nashville The location in Music City is intended to broaden the sport's appeal By Dan Daley, Audio Editor

Thursday, April 17, 2025 - 5:46 pm

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When Nashville hosted The Curling Group s All-Star Game April 15-16, it had nothing to do with music - Reba, Hank Jr., and all their rowdy friends are still the face of Music City - but curling's arrival speaks reams about the city's myriad connections to sport.

The All-Star Game took place at the Tee Line, a venue named for one of curling's boundary markers and owned by Marc Bulger, who quarterbacked in the NFL for 11 seasons and is now a resident of Nashville's Brentwood suburb. He took up curling in 2018 and fell in love with the sport. Deciding to bring it to Nashville, he built Tee Line in a converted warehouse in the ferociously gentrifying Nations neighborhood three years ago.

The Tee Line venue was built in Nashville in 2022 to house the sport of curling.

TCG's two-day All-Star event, the sport's first-ever (it followed the conclusion of the Grand Slam of Curling's final event of the 2024-25 season, the AMJ Players' Championship, April 8-13 in Toronto), hewed to the contemporary all-star format: celebrity pro-am, skills competition, and an All-Star Skins game. It took place on one of the three ice sheets on the competition side of the venue, which is kept at a cool 52F, separated by a massive glass wall from the Tee Line's spacious, hipster-rustic sports bar and three-lane bowling alley.

The Onsite Production TCG Technical Producer Brian Renwick, captaining a crew of a dozen or so technicians aboard Dome Productions Journey production truck parked outside the venue, has covered curling for two decades. Noting that this was his first time doing it in the States, he describes the Nashville event as an effort to expand the sport's appeal in the U.S.

For The Curling Group's All-Star Game, TCG's Brian Renwick headed a crew working from Dome Productions Journey.

TCG bought the Grand Slam of Curling from SportsNet this year, he explains, and is looking at new and different ways of promoting the game of curling across the nation and worldwide. They brought in a number of curlers from the Grand Slam to put on some fun and exciting events that are a little different from what the normal curling is: skills, competition, mixed events, skins game, and that kind of thing. We're here doing a live-to-tape production that will air down the road.

Two hard 1080 cameras were deployed, one at either end of the 146-ft.-long ice sheet, along with two handhelds with mics covering the splash.

TGC deployed two hard 1080 cameras, one at either end of the 146-ft.-long ice sheet, which was curated for the event by master icemaker Mark Shurek, who came in from Winnipeg to work his cryogenic magic. Two handhelds with mics were used to cover the splash, the sound and image when a stone makes a forceful hit on another stone.

The hard cameras catch the throws and the chatter in the house from either end, while the two handhelds cover the throws down at ice level, he says. And we've got a 12-ft. mini jib because the [interior] height didn't allow us to hang cameras above the sheet.

The live-to-tape production is sent to SportsNet Studios in Toronto for postproduction and distribution at a later date.

Announcers Devin Heroux (left), Jennifer Jones (center), and Brent Laing called TCG's All-Star Game from the sports-bar side of the venue.

Just on the other side of the glass partition, in the warmer environs of the sports bar, announcers Devin Heroux, Jennifer Jones, and Brent Laing called the show. On the sheet side, video monitors line the field of play and take a video feed from the truck to give spectators lining the sheet the ability to see the action along the entire runway. The fans, who are as vocal as the athletes and interact with them from as close as a foot or two away, are recorded through a pair of shotgun microphones above and along the sheet.

Hearing Voices Audio for the All-Star Game was managed by A1 Graham Zapf and a pair of A2s, one of whom, Mike Cleasby, was also in charge of the production's RF. Audio gets from the venue to the truck via MADI through an RME 3264 interface into the Calrec Artemis console, where it's recorded to a KiPro file-based recorder, an EVS replay system, and a multi-band SRT kit streaming to the Toronto plant for later processing.

A1 Graham Zapf: It's the only sport I know of that lets the players' sound carry the show. You can hear everything they're saying.

Effects sound is captured by five Sony ECM-77 lavaliere microphones set into slits in the foam bumpers lining the curling sheet. They capture the sounds of the specially made brooms that two of the four players per team use to whisk the ice, the friction creating a thin liquid layer on the surface to affect the movement of the approximately 42-lb. granite stones.

A2 Mike Cleasby checks out the DPA/Sennheiser lav/transmitter packs worn by all the players.

All the players are wired for sound with DPA lavaliere microphones and Sennheiser 5212 wireless transmitters. That is the sound that pulls viewers in, according to Zapf.

Everyone is miked, he says, and they're constantly talking strategy about how best to advance and position the stones. In hockey or basketball or football, the camera is following the play; in curling, you're following the players' thoughts through what they're saying.

A2 Mike Cleasby: You're hearing the strategy and, sometimes, the frustration right from the players, but that's what makes it interesting.

In fact, the announcers often cede the audio to the players as the dialog gets heated. As a res

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