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Austin will welcome the Premier Rugby Sevens Championship as its first non-soccer event this July. (Premier Rugby Sevens/Twitter)
Austin's Q2 Stadium will soon host its first non-soccer sporting event as it gears up to welcome the Premier Rugby Sevens 2022 Championship Weekend on Saturday, July 30.
The championship tournament will feature the best of the PR7s league, an equal-pay professional rugby league which holds four men's and four women's teams under the same umbrella.
Q2 Stadium, which normally hosts sold-out crowds for new MLS soccer club Austin FC, will add to its growing hosting repertoire with a championship weekend complete with bands, DJs, games, and special appearances in a festival atmosphere as Olympians and other top-notch athletes compete for the grand prize.
The league touts four men's and women's teams—including the Experts, Headliners, Loggerheads, and Loonies—and featured 15 Olympians in front of a cumulative audience of 472,000 viewers in its October 2021 debut.
Now, it's expanding to a multi-city format, with two tournaments consisting of brisk 14-minute matches set to be held at other MLS stadiums before the big day in Austin. The best men's and women's teams will then be crowned in the growing sports city of Austin.
Aside from Austin FC, Q2 Stadium has held both the U.S. men's and women's national soccer teams as well multiple Liga MX clubs, while Austin itself recently welcomed NASCAR, the PGA Tour/World Championship Dell Match Play golf tournament and Major League Pickleball, the city's first homegrown professional league.
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Texas' swimming and diving program has produced dozens of Olympic athletes. (Texas Men's Swimming and Diving/Twitter)
When the Team USA Swimming team came home with 30 medals to dominate the 2021 Summer Olympics, one medalist, Erica Sullivan, hung hers up in her new city of Austin.
As a new move-in, Sullivan had recently awakened from a "fever dream" silver-medal finish, just behind all-time women's swimming star Katie Ledecky, for a silver medal in the new 1500-meter freestyle race this summer.
"I will never forget the moment of touching the wall and seeing Katie slam the water and celebrate," Sullivan said. "That was one of the best moments of my life."
Katie Ledecky DOMINATES the first-ever Olympic women's 1500m final and takes the gold! 🔥
Her U.S. teammate Erica Sullivan won the silver 👏
(via @NBCOlympics)pic.twitter.com/oORZcsdDsw
— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) July 28, 2021
Now she's taking on a new, slightly more common challenge for 21-year-olds like herself—attending college at the University of Texas, where she's been competing with the UT swimming and diving program since the fall.
It's a program well known for its cream-of-the-crop athletes, including 11 Olympians who competed in Tokyo.
This season, Gibson and Windle train alongside freshman Hailey Hernandez, another Olympian from North Texas who joined the program this fall. The swimming program, which saw nine current, former and future Longhorns at the Games, will welcome one of the most promising young athletes in swimming come next season—two-time medalist Lydia Jacoby.
What's making such a strong current of athletes come to Texas? At least in Jacoby's case, a key piece of the pie is being rigorous in the recruiting process, head women's swimming coach Carol Capitani said.
"(Assistant coach Mitch Dalton) said, 'This might be a long shot, but I think this girl is going to be really good,'" Capitani said. "We couldn't meet people face to face on campus because of COVID, so we did a lot of Zoom calls and we just got really personal with her. I think we were just consistent the whole time."
ELECTRIC.
Relive the moment Lydia Jacoby's friends and family cheered her on to GOLD from Seward, Alaska. #TokyoOlympics pic.twitter.com/jjLWAlaljy
— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) July 27, 2021
For coaches like UT alum and Olympic athlete and coach Matt Scoggin, UT's head diving coach, that recruiting process starts early. Over a decade ago, it was Scoggin himself who pushed an eight-year-old Gibson to shift gears from swimming to diving in the first place.
"I noticed that every time I came in for practice, she was always in the lead," Scoggin said. "And so I just looked at her and said, 'You know what? You could become a world-class diver if you want.' And she looked at me with total belief in her eyes."
It doesn't hurt that coaches have plenty to boast about when recruiting the next Gibson or Jacoby. There's a reason Scoggin hasn't left the program since he and his wife joined 30 years ago, and it comes down to more than just the team's world-class alumni.
"Even when I was a diver here, there was a similar culture to what we have now," Scoggin said. "They know they're going to get better because that's a priority. Everyone gets better nearly every day... They all help each other go for a similar goal."
🔥 Erica Sullivan clocks 15:53.80 in the 1650 free - the No. 3 time in UT history! 🤘 #HookEm pic.twitter.com/W1ZMDCKcLX
— Texas Women's Swimming & Diving (@TexasWSD) February 5, 2022
Sullivan, who has competed internationally since she was seven, endured family hardship and is one of the few Asian and openly queer swimmers in the swimming community, said it's been nice to find a home within her team.
"Our culture here is rare to find anywhere else," Sullivan said. "We genuinely love each other. It's such a good environment... we've created this really good network of love."
Ranked at No. 1 and No. 2 respectively, the men's and women's swimming and diving teams are gearing up for the Big 12 Championships starting, Feb. 23. But it won't be time to dry off and rest afterward.
Holding strong at No. 1 🤘 pic.twitter.com/un2xAHrwkN
— Texas Men's Swimming & Diving (@TexasMSD) February 10, 2022
The men's team will look for its 43rd straight Big 12 Championship title and 16th NCAA team championship as the season wraps up in March.
Meanwhile, the women's side holds nearly 20 straight conference titles of its own—but Capitani said that's not the focus of her program as the team sets its sights on getting its first national championship title in 30 years this season.
"We've won nine national championships and we're going for our tenth... so I think that's the goal of the program," Capitani said.
The regular season is in the books.
Next stop,Big 12 Championships! 🤘#HookEm pic.twitter.com/q1MmcBMNIj
— Texas Women's Swimming & Diving (@TexasWSD) February 6, 2022
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Curl Austin is Texas' only ice rink dedicated to just curling. (Curl Austin)
Austin temperatures may hit the mid-80s in December, but new curling center Curl Austin has kept it cool since September as they teach warm-blooded Austinites about a fast-growing Winter Olympic sport: curling.
The sport, vaguely known by many but deeply understood by few, has its origins in 16th century Scotland but slowly spread as Scottish immigrants moved to North America and other Northern European countries. It's seen a renaissance in the 22 years since it was reintroduced into the Winter Olympics—and now, Austin residents don't have to wait until February to catch curling in action and even learn about it themselves.
Curl Austin is Texas' only curling-specific gym, an important detail for curling connoisseurs who know all too well the nicks and scrapes that hinder good curling at hockey rinks. That's because small droplets of ice are carefully formed on the surface of Curl Austin and other curling rinks across (mostly) the North, creating a challenge as curlers work to keep their stones straight and as close to the bulls-eye as possible. Consider it a giant shuffleboard on ice.
It's a sport that involves brooms, beer and even tech-savvy strategy—the perfect recipe for Austin and eventually the rest of the country, according to Curl Austin President David Gersenson.
"I love Austin... it's my type of place (and) I was really excited about it," Gersenson told Austonia. "I believe ultimately that curling is going to fit into every culture."
Gersenson, a Michigan native, compares the sport to pickleball, another once-obscure game that has taken Austin by storm. Like pickleball, which Gersenson has fervently picked up as well, curling can be embraced by people of all ages and skill levels.
At their two-hour Learn to Curl classes, Gersenson said they've seen curlers as young as 10 and old as 86 pick up the inclusive sport. It's a largely gender-neutral sport as well, and Gersenson said there are even having preliminary talks about a coed curling league.
"Big or small, young or old, athletic or arthritic, anybody can curl," Gersenson said. "It gives kids who don't have a sport, a sport that they can compete in that's more about balancing, communication and strategy."
And in true Austin-adjacent fashion, curling is a rare sport that promotes drinking beer—before, after and even during the game. By complete chance, Curl Austin is nestled right next to brewery Austin Beerworks and offers to pick up and bring beers to customers during their lessons.
"Beer and curling go together like peanut butter and jelly," Gersenson said.
And people are beginning to notice the easygoing nature of the sport. Even with COVID restrictions, curling grew by 18% in the U.S. in 2020. The rise of the sport—which has strangely been the butt of a joke for multiple Texas politicians—can also be attributed to what Texas Monthly labeled a "miracurl on ice," when the underdog men's team shocked the world by taking home a gold medal in the 2016 Olympics.
The rink has seen its fair share of challenges since its opening in September as an emerging winter sport in a balmy state. But they found help in the highest of places, when one of those famed gold-medal Olympians, Tyler George, joined the crew for a few months as Curl Austin's program manager and ambassador.
At just three months old, Curl Austin is focused on getting its feet on the ground and offering Learn to Curl events several days a week as well as private and group events. It has grown each month, something they think will only continue as the 2022 Winter Olympics take off in February 2022.
"We all believe that curling is a sport that America, once they really get into it, is going to fall in love with," Gersenson said. "I think that it's been a little underground now but has been gaining steam since being reintroduced into the Olympics. We still may be a little bit ahead of our time, but we believe it's coming in at some point."
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