By Wiley Wood
In December 2011, Mary Fanette was in her second and final term as president of the Norfolk Curling Club. Already on the boards of several Norfolk nonprofits and serving as the town’s volunteer webmaster, Fanette may have been looking forward to stepping down that coming May.

Then the clubhouse burned to the ground. A video taken in the early hours of December 18 as the firefighters arrived shows the roof already blazing and blue sparks crackling as water streamed down from the fire hoses. Norfolkians remember the twisted wreckage, the cracked curling stones, the building reduced to a bare sheet of concrete, as well as the story of the two young men who, fueled by alcoholic energy drinks and synthetic marijuana, went on a night of rampage.

Harder to imagine is the devastation and sense of hopelessness felt by the club members as they pondered how to proceed. The insurance company offered $760,000 in compensation, but a modern curling facility would cost at least twice that. “It was an overwhelming task,” says Fanette.

The board rewrote its bylaws to allow Fanette to continue as president for another two years. Then followed a hectic year. “The most important was figuring out how to organize ourselves,” says Fanette. They formed a building committee and a fundraising committee. “For a while, we met every Wednesday to think up ideas for how to raise money,” says Fanette. There were raffles, golf tournaments and bonspiels hosted by other curling clubs. Within a year, steel girders were being raised for the new building, and within two years the club had reopened its doors. Fanette had served a total of four years as club president.

The Norfolk Curling Club nominated Fanette as Volunteer of the Year in 2013, but with the future of the club still uncertain, she was passed over by the sport’s ruling body. Then the United States Curling Association asked the club to nominate Fanette again in 2014. Word of the destruction and rebuilding of the Norfolk Curling Club had spread throughout the tight-knit curling community. When the organization, which oversees the U.S. Olympic trials, actually chose Fanette, it was not entirely surprising.

“USA Curling is honored to present the award to Mary Fanette,” said Kim Nawyn, a spokesman for the organization. “She demonstrated a willingness to go above and beyond what anyone would have expected in her dedication to rebuilding the Norfolk Curling Club after it was lost to arson in 2011.”

Nawyn also cites Fanette’s outreach program after the club reopened its doors as exemplary. Fanette was determined that the club should be as inclusive as possible toward the wider community. She devised different levels of membership for those with an interest in the club who might not want to actively compete, the so-called “plate-glass memberships.” And she offered learn-to-curl clinics on Saturday mornings when the ice wasn’t otherwise being used. “At the height of the interest, I had to turn people away because I could only handle 16 curlers at a time,” says Fanette. Membership grew from a low of 38 right after the fire to its present level of around 130 members.

USA Curling will fly Fanette out to Denver in October to attend the annual meeting and will publish a cover story on her in the national curling quarterly. In addition, a board member will present Fanette an engraved award and a USA Curling jacket at the Norfolk Curling Club’s opening dinner on October 16.

As this article is being written, elements of a commercial kitchen are being installed in the clubhouse, and cameras are being installed above the houses (targets) at either end of the ice sheets looking straight down. “It’s the only way that someone in the warm room can tell whatís really happening on the ice,” says Fanette. The compressors that will lower the concrete slab’s temperature to the freezing point are being cranked up. The new curling season starts in October.

Photo by Bruce Frisch.