Stones & Stripes

The Regions Cup is making its debut in 2025-2026, what could it look like?

2025-2026 is going to be a pivotal season for USA Curling. We’ve already seen the announcement of John Landsteiner’s retirement, which means another member of the 2018 men’s gold medal team is stepping away from competitive curling.

And in a year where both the men’s and women’s teams will need to go to the Olympic Qualifying Event in Kelowna just to make it to Cortina, there is no shortage of storylines and potential drama on the menu.

While that is going to be the focus for many fans (and I’ll have more on this once the season really starts in September), USA Curling is trying to drum up some on-ice drama for their region-based championships through the Regions Cup.

As I’m still working on tracking down information for a couple playdowns, and the largest arena regional playdown is coming up in a few weeks, I’m going to hold off on any playdowns results in this newsletter and instead focus on something new coming in 2025-2026. As if we needed more things to follow, right? (Thank you, USA Curling, for keeping me busy.)

This is a shorter newsletter this month with a little bit of a different feel, but let’s dive into a fun new thing coming for grassroots championships.

Exploring the Regions Cup

Earlier this month, USA Curling announced the Regions Cup, where regions will accumulate points at four national championship events. According to their news release, “Points will be awarded based on team placements in each of the four championships. The RRA with the highest cumulative score at the end of the season will be crowned the Regions Cup Champion.”

The events with points on the line will be Arena Club Nationals, U18 Nationals, Club Nationals, and Mixed Fours Nationals. While the press release notes accumulations of points in four events, it’s technically seven events as there is a men’s and women’s championship for arena, U18, and club events.

I think this is a really intriguing idea, and I look forward to yet another thing to track for this upcoming season. Good thing it’s not an Olympic year or anything…

While I’m not sure that this really moves the needle on much of anything, there is no harm in trying something different.

For me, the announcement hits a few positive notes:

• Hopefully this encourages clubs to tune in and cheer for their teams at national championships. While this is a bit pie-in-the-sky, higher viewership is always good, especially if USA Curling is trying to gain any additional sponsorship revenue from events.

• By including U18, Arenas, and Clubs, it helps to create a more equitable playing field allowing juniors and adults as well as arena and dedicated ice curlers to contribute to their region’s success.

• Ideally, this can give a slight boost to participation in championships from all regions. This is a bit difficult for our friends in the Alaska region, but for the other nine regional associations, playdown participation varies highly. Any boost to create higher consistent participation is a good thing.

How will it work?

The press release from USA Curling did not include any mention of specifics for the point system, and when I inquired further about it, I was told the points system is still a work in progress. It’s likely that whatever we see in this first year will be tweaked in coming years until a system is in place that is reasonable while also keeping the final point-event of the season, Mixed Fours, relevant for the standings.

With that said, I wanted to see what this could like, so I did what I normally do:

I made a spreadsheet.

First, I pulled up the results for all four championships (again, 7 events) and assigned a region to each place. On this, a couple notes:

1. The press release notes that if a region has multiple representatives at a championship, only the highest-finishing team is awarded points which means no more than 10 teams will be awarded points (1 per region).

2. If two teams from two different pools had the same record, I based the ranking on their final DSC numbers. I’m not sure if they will be awarded as a tie by USA Curling in the final system, but I went this route for the sake of simplicity.

I then ranked the regions and assigned points using three different points systems to see how the cup standings would play out. These were very quick-and-dirty type of points allocations, so I’m sure there is a better way, but I wanted to see what a few different models might look like.

In all three of the points models, the Minnesota region came out on top, thanks in large part to their U18 success as well as their lack of low finishes at any event. In all three models, they were basically uncatchable going into the Mixed Fours National Championship.

While the winner was effectively decided going into the final event with all three models, the MACA region jumped from 5th place to 2nd place in Version 3 with Team Falco’s win in Denver.

Note: I did not use USA Curling’s win-loss tiebreakers to determine ties in Versions 1 and 2.

With some more time, I’m sure there is a more balanced way to game this out, but it was fun to do a quick simulation of how this might have worked last season.

Every year will be different, and I’ll be curious to see how everything shakes out in year one, not to mention seeing how USA Curling decides to assign points in the inaugural season of the Regions Cup. No matter what, it will be a fun side story to follow in an otherwise packed curling season.

I should have another update coming out in a few weeks with more results from arena playdowns following the conclusion of the MACA Arena Playdowns. If you want to tune in, those playdowns should be streamed on the Four Seasons Curling Club YouTube channel beginning on August 7th.

Believe it or not, that will be one of the last newsletters of the summer, with the curling season already starting to ramp up in earnest in about 2 months from now.

Until then, enjoy the summertime, and good curling!