TEMPE, Ariz. — How does a year-old university curling team with only six members get to the national championships?
Andie McDonald, that's how.
"I'm very excited," McDonald said, standing on the ice. "It's been a long time coming."
The team, the recruiting and most of the coaching, it's all McDonald. She grew up with the sport of curling. Her dad, Patrick McDonald, is a two-time Paralympian in curling.
But ASU doesn't have a curling team. And curling isn't an NCAA-sanctioned sport at all, it's run by USA Curling.
Andie McDonald could have kept playing in a local league. Instead, she founded a new team.
"She was like, 'I need people to come,' so I came," Xavier Litman said. "I ended up enjoying it and I've been stuck here ever since!"
Litman, from El Paso, Texas, had never curled before. Coming from El Paso, he'd barely seen an ice rink before.
“We've done more than we thought we could in a year," Litman said. "I'm just excited to be here."
"I don't know how we got here, to be honest," Litman said.
Curling is a sport that's popular in Canada, the Midwest and the East Coast – but not as popular in the West and South. And for good reason, people come here to escape the cold.
It's played by sliding a stone down the ice to land in the "house," a giant bullseye. "Sweepers" with brooms help direct the stone. It's like a game of ice shuffleboard.
Litman and four others make up the ASU club team. They've competed for only a year, but have qualified to go to the national championships in Wisconsin on March 8.
The catch: since they're not an NCAA sport, they have no budget. Uniforms, supplies, airfare, it's all on them.
They've set up a GoFundMe to help with the costs. Regardless, Andie McDonald said, the college national championships were her goal. A goal she refused to drop.
‘I was like, 'I want to go to college nationals, I would like to do this before I graduate,'" McDonald said. "And I made it happen."
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