Halifax to host inaugural season of curling’s first professional league

CITYnews halifax/ By Steve Gow

A brand new professional curling league is launching and Halifax will be among the Canadian cities to get a first look.

Following the success of the Canadian Olympic Curling Trials in Halifax in November, Rock League has announced the municipality as the second stop for the inaugural full season of curling’s first professional league.

Rock League will feature six mixed-gender, global franchises competing across multiple fast-paced formats designed to showcase some of the world’s best athletes.

“We are featuring 60 of the best curlers in the world,” says Nic Sulsky, Rock League’s CEO and co-founder. “Thirty men and thirty women will be competing in every event, we have dozens of Olympians, we have dozens of gold-medalists. It is quite literally the greatest collection of curlers that the world has ever seen.”

Among those elite athletes will be Nova Scotia’s Marlee Powers, who signed up for the league’s Team Shield after winning a silver medal as a member of Team Black at the Canadian Olympic Curling Trials in November.

Other top athletes playing in Rock League will include Ontario’s Rachel Homan and Brad Jacobs as well as Niklas Edin, a highly decorated Swedish curler.

Owned and operated by The Curling Group, Halifax will host Rock League in January 2027 with an event planned at Scotiabank Centre.

Sulsky says it is about time the sport of curling got its own professional league.

“There is a real desire to be able to capture not only the best athletes on the planet but also surrounded with experience,” says Sulsky. ” The thing that Rock League is going to bring to locations, that candidly some of these other sports don’t need to think about, is what is the experience of being a curling fan.”

He adds curling events and tournaments are more than just about the sport on the ice and Rock League aims to encapsulate that environment through activations, VIP experiences and parties all planned around league games.

Details on the schedule and ticket on-sale dates, programming, and other information will be released in the coming months on Rock League’s website.