Rock League is giving curling its first true professional franchise league

The sweepers are out front, and curling is trying to move faster than it ever has before.

Just over a month after the Winter Olympics put the sport back in front of a huge global audience, the new Rock League is set to open in Toronto from April 6 to 12. It will offer something curling has never had before: a professional league built around franchises, team branding and a broadcast-ready format.

The league will feature six mixed-gender franchises and events across men’s, women’s, mixed team and mixed doubles competition. According to The Curling Group, which operates the league, games will run about two hours. The company also owns the Grand Slam of Curling series. Additionally, it has brought in former Olympic champions Jennifer Jones and John Morris as strategic advisors for rosters and format.

For chief executive Nic Sulsky, the timing was the point.

“Curling is always among the most watched winter Olympic sports... it was incredible, it was super fun and electric,” Sulsky told Reuters. “We knew when we founded The Curling Group, that capitalizing on the Olympic momentum was going to be core to our business.”

He said the original thought was to wait until 2027 or 2028. That changed once curling started drawing attention again. “It was a must,” he said. “We’re having this conversation right now because everybody’s been talking about curling.”

Rock League’s sales pitch is not subtle. It wants to make curling feel louder, shorter and easier for casual fans to follow.

“The goal with Rock League is to reframe the sport, to showcase the incredible energy in curling events and the amazing personality that a lot of these curlers have,” Sulsky said.

That means jerseys, logos and fans cheering for franchises rather than just national teams or traditional rinks. It also means a structure The Curling Group believes can give elite players something curling has long lacked. In particular, it gives them a true professional system.

“From a business perspective, this is the first true professional ecosystem that the curlers have been able to participate in,” Sulsky said. “What we want to be able to do is create a platform where curlers can dream about one day being an actual professional athlete.”

The first six teams are organized by region, with two from Canada, two from Europe, one from the United States and one from Asia-Pacific. Each roster is expected to include five men and five women. The announced captains are Rachel Homan, Brad Jacobs, Bruce Mouat, Alina Paetz, Korey Dropkin and Chinami Yoshida. Full rosters will be decided later.

For several of those players, the appeal goes beyond a new competition.

“I never really thought of what’s the potential of being a full-time curler,” Mouat said. “As soon as we found out about this pro league, I was like, well, this is it.”

Paetz said the format could also challenge stale ideas about the sport. “If you talk to the people outside, they just think curling is kind of a little bit of a boring sport and like only old people play it, and that’s just not what it is.”

The Curling Group says Rock League is aimed at two audiences at once. It wants to keep traditional curling fans, but it also wants to pull in people who may only tune in every four years during the Olympics.

Sulsky described the new league as a possible gateway into the rest of the curling calendar, especially the Grand Slam of Curling season in the fall. If viewers come for the star power and the shorter format, the company hopes they will stay for the broader sport.

That star power is real. The roster pool includes Olympic medalists from the Milano Cortina Games, and the league is leaning hard into that connection. Homan linked the launch to a larger moment for women’s sports in Canada. In recent years, leagues and expansion teams have gained traction in hockey, soccer and basketball.

“There’s much more opportunity for women in sport, and I feel like little girls’ dreams can be realized now,” she said.

Still, the rollout comes with open questions. The source material says the league was first introduced with plans for a six-week inaugural season across Canada, the United States and Europe. However, the debut now comes as a shorter Toronto event meant to offer a taste of the format before a longer return in 2027.

Official team names, event details, locations and broadcast information were still to be announced in the source material. Additionally, full rosters were not yet finalized.

The business model is also still being built. For now, the franchises are owned and operated by The Curling Group, which is in the middle of a Series A fundraising round. Sulsky said the company may eventually sell majority stakes in the teams to regional partners after the league grows.

The original story "Rock League is giving curling its first true professional franchise league" is published in The Brighter Side of News.

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