Larry Ridley goes curling

Curling has been an Olympic sport for a little more than a decade, but it's already become one of the more popular attractions at the Winter Olympics.

Larry Ridley headed out to the Broomstones Curling Club in Wayland for a crash course in the Olympic sport. The club's Dayton Neill put Ridley to the test.

"What we do is when we slide out, we call it a ‘handshake release'...it naturally puts a nice, gentle spin on it," Neill said.

After a few attempts, Larry got the technique down.

"Ideally, our brooms are supposed to get as close as they can to the stone, but the problem is if you hit me or hit the stone, it's called a ‘burned stone,'" explained Neill.

After the curling lesson, Neill explained how the scoreboard works.

"You look at it and you say, ‘that's a baseball scoreboard.' It's actually the exact opposite, because in baseball, this would be the innings. But in curling, this is actually the score. This is where I think of it as two thermometers: the red thermometer is doing the red score and the yellow thermometer is doing the yellow score...The scoreboard only goes up to 18, and rarely do you ever see it go up to 18. Typically, if one team's at 18, another team is just being creamed and they're down three or four," said Neill.

Click here for the complete Olympic curling schedule on 7NBC.

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