WSU Adds Curling as Seventh Men's Sport for 2013

Are you ready for some curling?

Washington State Athletic Director Bill Moos is set to announce the addition of curling as the seventh men's varsity sport played by the Cougars. An official press conference will be held Monday at 1 p.m. at the Latah County Fairgrounds ice rink. WSU will add the sport officially in 2013, and will play a full Pac-12 slate against the conference foes that currently field curling teams (USC, Stanford, Colorado, Utah, UCLA, Oregon State and associate member for curling only, Alaska-Fairbanks).

Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott said in a statement, "We welcome the addition of Washington State to curling as we try to expand our number of Olympic sports played conference-wide. We hope to have all of our member institutions field a curling team by 2015, and this is a step in the right direction." Scott added, "We've thrown another rock in the house, if you catch my drift."

Curling matches will air locally on ROOT sports and will air nationally in 2014 on the recently-announced ESPNU2 network. ROOT Sports said in a statement: "We're excited about this new partnership to bring Pac-12 sports onto television alongside the Mariners, Sounders, Mariners, Washington Husky Football!, Mariners baseball and also please watch the Mariners. Seriously though." ESPN President John Skipper said, "We can't wait to have more valuable sports programming for our new ESPNU2 network, which is a college sports network and NOT a collaboration between ESPN and the band U2. Please stop writing us e-mails asking us about that, because it's not."

It's an exciting move for WSU, one that Bill Moos called "pretty dope" in a teleconference this morning, which was also April 1st. WSU still needs to hire a coaching staff and a first recruiting class, but Moos noted that there are 34.8 million Canadians currently in existence, so it shouldn't be that hard to find some.

Happy April Fools Day, everyone.