By Jolene Latimer
Five hundred years ago, when Scottish monks first slid stones across frozen ponds, they could hardly have predicted a curling match featuring TikTok videos, banana suits, and two-hour broadcast windows. Yet that’s where curling now finds itself — a centuries-old sport trying to keep pace with modern attention spans.
This season, the Grand Slam of Curling is experimenting with some of the biggest rule changes in recent memory. Teams are now allowed only one blank end per game. Extra ends are gone. And "thinking time" — the clock that dictates how long players can deliberate — has been reduced. The goal: make draws faster, sharper and easier to fit inside a broadcast window without losing the strategy that defines the sport.
"We have to figure out a way to get the sport to two hours — that’s the ideal broadcast window,” said Nic Sulsky, CEO and co-founder of The Curling Group. "Extra ends are too unpredictable from a broadcast perspective, and it’s long. We’re testing lots of things because, at the end of the day, when a casual fan turns on curling for the first time and it’s 1-0 in the fourth end, you’re like, 'What is this?'"
The changes have also forced players to adjust their approach. Olympic gold medallist Kaitlyn Lawes said the tweaks demand skips think differently.
"I think it changes your strategy and your thought process about when you are going to potentially use your blank. If you’re playing a simpler end early on and you end up using your blank, then you kind of have to go all in later on," she said. "I don’t think that blank ends are necessarily a bad thing in the sport, so I’m curious to see how it works."
Whether the new rules will stick remains to be seen, but what makes curling’s experiment particularly notable isn’t just the pace of play — it’s who the changes apply to. Unlike many sports, where innovation often starts in women’s leagues before trickling into the men’s game, curling’s new rules apply equally across both. The men’s and women’s sides are evolving together, each playing under the same conditions, testing the same ideas.
INNOVATION IS OFTEN A WOMEN'S GAME
It’s no secret that change comes slowly to men’s professional sports. It took MLB much deliberation before the pitch clock was implemented. The NHL still hasn't mandated the use of neck guards for all players. The CFL's major rule changes announced this year have been debated by fans for decades.
Most women's leagues don't have the luxury of being romantic about tradition. As they vie for attention, they've leaned on innovation to attract fans. As a result, they've become laboratories for change — from the Professional Women's Hockey League's choose your opponent playoff selection process to Athletes Unlimited's rotating rosters. That push to innovate has also created a split: the men's and women's games are now evolving at different speeds.
Hockey's jailbreak rule illustrates the point. Two years ago, when the PWHL debuted, it introduced a twist: a minor penalty ends if the short-handed team scores.
"I think that might change the way a power play thinks a little bit, having that rule," Florida Panthers forward Sam Reinhart told me at the NHL All-Star Game in 2024.
I also asked Anaheim Ducks forward Frankie Vatrano the same question.
"I think the rule's great," he said. "The NHL's always open for change."
He might have been optimistic on that last point. The new rule was part of a handful of changes to hockey’s canon that the PWHL has introduced since its inception. Last season, the NHLPA polled its players on which, if any, they would like to introduce to the NHL. Nearly one in three players said they’d like to see the jailbreak rule implemented on the men’s side. But when I asked NHL commissioner Gary Bettman about that at the 2025 Stanley Cup Final, he pointed out the math — a majority of players don’t want changes.
"We like the way our game is being played right now," Bettman said. "We don’t think we need to change the rules."
In hockey, the men’s and women’s games will continue to evolve separately — and that separation sometimes means new ideas can still subconsciously feel like experiments, not progress.
Not so in curling. GSOC has introduced rule changes that apply equally across the men’s and women’s draws, testing new formats in real-time. It’s one of the few sports where both sides of the game evolve together — no version takes precedence.
That doesn’t mean all the rule changes impact both men’s and women’s teams in the same way. For example, men’s teams are known for blanking more ends while women’s teams typically keep more stones in play, so limiting blank ends might have less of an impact for most women’s teams compared to men's.
"It definitely changes some things for us, and I’m sure quite a few teams — majority probably in the men’s game," Rachel Homan told Devin Heroux in a recent episode of "Beyond the Broom."
Kerri Einarson agreed.
"In women’s curling, you don’t overly see a whole lot of blanks happen, and for my team, we don’t really keep things too open; we like to go at it and play the game,” she said. “In the men’s game, you see a lot more of that happening and playing blank ends, so I can see why they wanted to make it more interesting on that side of things."
But, with rule changes consistent for both men’s teams and women’s teams, it avoids relegating one gender to the testing ground while signaling the other as the official version of the sport.
As curling’s new rules settle in, the sport is still figuring out where the balance lies between precision and pace, between old habits and new demands. Not every change will be a success.
"I’m not a fan of the reduced thinking time," Einarson said. "That’s curling. It’s such a precise sport. It’s not like other sports where you can just go out there and shoot the basketball or play volleyball, it’s just so precise and so much thinking goes into it and strategy-wise."
There is sure to be more back and forth about what rule changes work and which ones should be abandoned. But in curling, everyone is part of the same experiment — and that’s one longstanding tenet of the sport that’s unlikely to change.
What happens next will depend on how both sides of the sport adapt. That’s the point of doing it together — to find out, in real time, what works and what doesn’t.
"You never know until you try," Homan said.
