Ybor City Curling Club

I know a number of people have been asking us about merchandise. We met with Broomfitters this morning and are working on getting a club page set up with them where everyone can purchase some merchandise. If you head to their website, you can check out some of the other clubs that have club pages there. Once we get set up, money that is spent there will help flow back towards our club so we can buy new equipment and support our programs. It will be a bit before things will be ready for sale (we will have to work on designs), but we are excited to have some merchandise for everyone coming soon. Let us know if you have any specific items you would like to see available or stocked!

We are getting all of our curling equipment ready to go! We have our invoice and are ready to go with our rocks, pebbler, hacks, and scraper. We are getting everything from Kevin Martin Curling and are excited to partner with Kevin to make sure we have high quality curling equipment. Our yellow and blue handled rocks are coming straight from Curling Canada and are new, international competition quality rocks, never having been used before. We are looking forward to seeing how they play on the new sheets and hope you are as well!

We are officially moving forward with Warm Room Hero as our new website platform! We are super excited to be moving forward with them and are looking forward to building out an actual full website that will be our future home. We will be working with them over the next few weeks to build out content for the website and to build out the look and feel of the website. We will let everyone know when the new website is live so everyone can take a look and let us know what they think!

In the meantime, if you have come across any curling clubs that you feel like have something really cool on their website or something that really improves the user experience, let us know! We would love to consider things we can incorporate into our website.

Finally, we know a few of you have expressed interest in running the website for the club. Once we get everything set up, we definitely will be reaching out. We just want to make sure we have the bones of the website up and running and hooked into all of our systems the way we need first.

This week's progress update!

We have started cutting concrete and painting inside the warehouse. Work there is ongoing, and we will share more soon!

We ordered some club equipment this week (brooms, stabilizers, shooting sticks, sliders, and grippers) so we can be ready to be up and running when our ice is ready.

Now that we officially have 501(c)(3) status, we've been working on some of the admin work that comes with that. That includes registering with the state to solicit contributions, setting our QuickBooks account up 501(c)(3) billing, and setting up a Google Workspaces account so we can set up club email addresses and organize our documents. It is fairly unexciting stuff, but they are things we need to operate effectively.

We are also working on finalizing an agreement with a new website vendor. We are waiting on the official contract, but we should have a new website to show off in the next month or so.

That's all for now, but things are moving quick so I'm sure we will have more to share with everyone in short order!

I guess we will be doing a lot of sweeping practice while waiting for the club to open, because we have our club brooms and other equipment purchased and on the way! We will have some club brooms, stabilizers, shooting sticks, and sliders so that we can start running learn to curls and rentals right away. We obviously still recommend that anyone who curls long term is best off getting their own shoes, broom, and (if needed) stabilizer, but we don't want that to be the thing holding you back from falling in love with our great sport.

Now that it is May, we now have control of the warehouse! In the next few weeks, we will be doing some painting and touch up work on the walls, working on cutting some concrete to get the floor dimensions we need, redoing the lighting to better fit what we need in a curling club, and flattening the floor. We will get some pictures soon for everybody once we do a bit of touch up work so everyone can see what the club is looking like as it is starting to come together.

We have some exciting news - we are now 501(c)(3) approved and are a recognized non-profit by the IRS!

So what does that mean?

✅ Donations are now tax-deductible – Your support goes even further and makes an even bigger impact.

✅ More resources for curling – With tax-exempt status, more of every dollar we receive can go directly into building and growing the club.

✅ Stronger partnerships – This opens the door for sponsorships, matching gift programs, and collaborations that help us grow faster.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us along the way—we couldn’t have gotten here without you. And we’re just getting started.

We've had a lot of people reach out to us and ask how they can help build out the club or volunteer once it is open. To help us keep track of everyone who has offered and to help us send more directed volunteer information to those who are interested, we have put together a short volunteer survey. If you are interested in getting involved, please take a minute to fill it out for us!

Ybor City Curling Club Volunteer Survey Thank you for showing interest in volunteering with us at the Ybor City Curling Club! Our goal is to provide the best curling experience for everybody. To do that, the more volunteers we get helping out both pre and post opening, the stronger club we can build. This survey will help us with more tar...

This week on what has the Ybor City Curling Club been working on:

We have our scraper sourced and are now just working on getting our rocks. We should have those lined up soon and then, once they are all lined up, we will be putting the down payment on the majority of our curling specific equipment (scraper, hacks, pebbler, and stones).

We are currently working on evaluating a few website vendors. There are a few companies that build/provide websites for curling clubs and we are getting demos from them to help us pick out the right site for us moving forward.

Finally, we have been putting together a volunteer survey. Many people have asked us how they can help out, so we want to help give an idea on where we can use some volunteers. We also want to help ourselves get better organized so that we know who wants to volunteer with what. Keep an eye out for that later this week!