By Jack Schwed
Olympic Update! 2/11/26 :
Former Broomstones curler earns silver in mixed doubles
Minnesota Couple Breaks Two Winter Olympics Droughts For Team USA in Curling – Yahoo Sports
Korey Dropkin grew up at Broomstones Curling Club in Wayland. Every Sunday afternoon, he would step onto the ice, wanting nothing more than to be as good as his older brother, Stephen Dropkin.
Now, at 30 years old — after spending his formative years at Broomstones, located 12 miles from his hometown of Southborough, then moving to Duluth, Minn., to chase his longtime Olympic dreams — Korey is playing in the 2026 Winter Olympic Games, taking place in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy from Feb. 6–22.
There, he and Corey Thiesse, his curling partner since 2022, will compete in mixed doubles, representing Team USA.
“It’s almost hard to describe the words when you see your child’s dream come true,” said Shelley Dropkin, Korey’s mother. “I get all verklempt when I think about it, because he’s been so, so close, so many times, and to finally have it come together for him is just amazing.”
Korey has participated in the U.S. Teams Olympic Trials twice before, but both times lost two of the three final games needed to qualify for the Olympics, said Keith Dropkin, Korey’s father. He said Korey had been “on the edge” of qualifying for eight years before eventually winning in 2025.
“You think the Olympics are right in front of you, you got it right in your hand — ‘Make this shot, and I’m going to the Olympics’ — and it doesn’t happen,’ Keith Dropkin said. “To be able to continue to pursue that goal and not let the disappointment set you back makes all the difference in the world to who actually gets there someday and who doesn’t.”
The Dropkin family’s curling history started with Korey Dropkin’s dad, who played the sport in college and later became a member of Broomstones in 1978. Keith Dropkin and his wife, Shelley Dropkin, said Broomstones soon became the “center” of their lives.
The two of them served as co-vice presidents of the club at a time when they weren’t sure it was going to survive, said Rich Collier, president of Broomstones. With their community outreach efforts, they recruited increasing numbers of new members. Now, the club is one of the most prominent in the country with around 480 members, he said.
Collier said Shelley Dropkin and Keith Dropkin used their expertise on the sport to “invest” in the next generation of curlers. They began coaching the junior program, including their children Korey Dropkin and Stephen Dropkin.
Though Korey Dropkin was in the junior program at Broomstones, he played at an “adult level,” Collier said, often playing alongside more senior curlers in the club’s most competitive leagues.
Collier, who began at Broomstones around the same time as Korey, described him as “fiercely competitive,” saying he was always serious about curling, even when he was a teenager. Collier said many professional curlers now place a heavy emphasis on physical fitness and mental preparation, and he said Korey Dropkin “fits right into that mold.”
“He’s a very quintessential elite athlete in that way, which is not uncommon in any elite sport, but I think certainly in curling, sometimes curlers have a little bit of a reputation of being everyday kind of people,” he said. “And often we are.”
Korey Dropkin is among a new wave of curlers trying to make curling a professional sport, Keith Dropkin said.
At the moment, Keith Dropkin said, even the highest level players need to find a way to support themselves. Korey Dropkin, for instance, is a licensed realtor in both Minnesota and Wisconsin, working for the Superior Shores Real Estate Group.
Keith Dropkin said one existing effort to professionalize curling is the Rock League — the first professional curling league in the world — which is slated to begin in April. Korey Dropkin was selected as the captain of Frontier, the league’s U.S.-based team, he said.
“We keep talking about professionalizing the sport in the U.S., but we don’t have the infrastructure to really do that in a way that you actually make a living doing this,” Shelley Dropkin said. “Many countries do. We’re not there yet. We’re quite a long ways away, so this may be the path toward that.”
Jenna Burchesky, director of marketing for USA Curling and Korey Dropkin’s longtime family friend, said she recruited Korey Dropkin to help her with a project while she was in college to visit schools and educate young people about curling.
Burchesky said she chose him because he had the ability to “spark something” within the students and show them that curling was a sport for young people, too.
“For a long time, curling has been fighting a stereotype of, it’s just a bunch of dads who go out and drink beer and do this weird sport,” she said. “Korey really is the perfect person to be breaking that stereotype.”
Korey Dropkin could not be interviewed for this story as he was in Switzerland preparing for the Olympics in late January, according to his mother. In the weeks leading up to the competition, he has been in “complete lockdown” and was unable to have any external communication, including with his parents, she said.
