When Ken Olson arrived for a curling match at the St. Paul Curling Club and soon was playing against guys who saw the sport on television and wandered in off the street, he knew something had changed.

Boy, has it ever.

The St. Paul facility, the nation's largest member-owned club and entering its 93rd year, is riding the biggest surge of popularity in the sport's history and is so crowded that a group of club members is planning to open a facility in the west-metro area by fall 2005.

Since being contested in the Winter Olympics for the second time in 2002, curling has been attracting fans like never before. NBC's ICE 2003 program, which included a tape-delayed broadcast of the Continental Cup tournament, drew a 2.0 overnight rating on Dec. 14. The figure, posted on the same day as Saddam Hussein's capture and a full slate of NFL games, was higher than many National Hockey League telecasts that weekend.

Nationwide membership in curling clubs is up 8 percent since the Salt Lake City Olympics, and many organizations stay open late into the evening to accommodate everyone who wants to play.

That includes St. Paul's club on Selby Avenue. It has eight ice sheets that are practically filled from noon to midnight every day, and its membership has jumped from 860 to 960 since the 2002 Winter Olympics.

"It's a sport in which you can play at any competitive level you want," said Olson, president of the Twin Cities Curling Association, the group heading the drive for a new facility. "It's a nice complement to what a lot of people do. A lot of people curl in the winter and golf in the summer."

Olson's group - about a dozen financial planners and marketing professionals who develop plans for the new facility by night - is looking at a host of possible sites, including St. Louis Park, Golden Valley, Hopkins and Eden Prairie.

Olson obtained the ice plant from the now-defunct Denver Curling Club, and has everything the new Twin Cities club needs to make ice, saving the TCCA about $100,000. The cost of a new facility is $500,000 to $1.2 million.

"We've got a bunch of different potential funding methods, grants and outright donors being a couple of them," said Neil Marriott, a TCCA vice president. "Like in golf, curling attracts the professional person, so maybe there are people who would donate. But it's difficult to talk about funding. We're in the midst of filing for incorporation, so we can't accept a dollar bill or write a check yet."

[WebMaster:  Curling attracts people from all walks of life - from kids, adults, and seniors, from first time amateurs, to Olympic champions - not just professionals.]

Marriott said the group is looking into partnering with a high school or constructing a facility that could also be used for skating.

[WebMaster:  This is just ONE of the MANY different possible relationships that we are exploring, and definitely not the ONLY relationship.  Even though a dual-use facility is a possibility, it is not something we are actively pursuing.] 

The TCCA is on a tight schedule. A facility would take six to eight months to construct, but Olson doesn't believe the timetable is unreasonable. And there's no doubt about the demand for a new building.

When the group sent out a survey to more than 800 curlers in December, more than 50 percent wrote back asking for a new facility in the west-metro area. Many curlers must drive 45 minutes to an hour to get to the current site, and play only about once a week because of the distance.

Current plans are for the facility to have four ice sheets, which would accommodate 350 to 400 curlers.

Even Allison Pottinger, an Eden Prairie resident and a member of the 2003 world championship women's team, said she would make the switch from St. Paul after a new facility is opened.

"It's hard to get everybody ice time in St. Paul," she said. "I'm definitely going to curl at the club out west. At first I'd probably curl at both, just to smooth the transition, but I would like to move to the west metro."

Pottinger, whose husband Doug also curls, works at General Mills and travels with her team most weekends. Needless to say, she would welcome a practice facility closer to home.

"On the way there, it's sometimes 45 minutes," she said. "I would miss the people in St. Paul a lot, but hopefully we could start an interclub league or something. The people in St. Paul have been very supportive."