Short Hills Curler to Compete in World Championships

Several years ago, Dean Gemmell returned to the sport he played as a child in Canada. It was mostly for fun and recreation, but he found he still had it and before long he was competing on the national level.

And at the end of this month, he and his teammates on Team USA will head to Basel, Switzerland, where they will represent the United States at the 2012 World Men’s Championship games.

“We’ve been close in the playoffs the last two years but haven’t been able to win,” Gemmell said. “None of us have ever represented the U.S. in a world event. That’s really exciting.”

They will also compete in the trials for the 2014 Winter Olympics. To get the berth in the World games, Gemmell's team, called "Team McCormick" until they became Team USA, beat the previous national champions, 5-4, in front of a sold-out crowd of more than 1,300 fans in Aston, Pa.

This was the second straight year a men’s team has advanced through the national championships undefeated but the first U.S. men’s title for Team McCormick, which includes Gemmel, Heath McCormick of Sarnia, Ontario, Bill Stopera of Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., Martin Sather of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. 

Gemmell practices five or six days a week, often at the Plainfield Curling Club as well as other times with teammates in Westchester, N.Y.

When he’s not curling or driving to curling, he’s often still thinking about curling because he also runs a podcast for hard-core curling fans called The Curling Show, on which he interviews top curling athletes and others who influence the game. The Curling Show is recorded in his studio in Short Hills and as of a couple of years ago, had about 10,000 listeners online.

He grew up in Ontario, where he started “throwing rocks” (a nickname for curling) when he was 12 years old. He was a junior curler in southern Ontario and, at age 20, he was the lead on the Quebec team at the 1988 Brier – Canada’s national tournament.

But after moving to the United States, he stopped curling because he lived too far from a rink to keep it up.

So when he and his wife moved to New Jersey, they chose Short Hills, in part, because of its proximity to the Plainfield Curling Club, about 30 minutes away and the only club of its kind in New Jersey.

These are exciting days for him and his family, he said, as they support his training and efforts to become a world champion.

"Everyone's thrilled, and I'd like to be able to take everyone with me but we're not sure -- my daughter goes to Glenwood and she's got school that week so we haven't decided," he said. "...But they are very excited, too. It's all been a thrill."