Curling Champion: Caitlin Costello Pulli ’97

The first ‘skip’ of a national mixed curling champion leads a team to this fall’s world curling championships.

NUANCED VIEW: “Balance and touch” are the keys to being a curler, says Pulli, who has played the sport most of her life, including as a student at Rochester. “A great curler develops patiently over time by learning all the nuances of the game.”
Featured image photo credit: J. Adam Fenster

After finishing second in a national curling competition in 2019, Caitlin Costello Pulli ’97 couldn’t wait for another shot at gold. Turns out, she had to wait three years, as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down competition.

This past April, Pulli and three teammates made up for lost time by capturing the 2022 US mixed fours curling championship, hosted by the Rochester Curling Club. The national title earned them a spot in the world championships, scheduled for October in Aberdeen, Scotland, and featuring about 40 teams from across the globe.

“Winning nationals was a dream come true, especially in front of a hometown crowd and friends and family,” Pulli says. “It was worth the wait.”

Team Pulli is headed by Caitlin—the first female captain (known as a “skip”) to win a national mixed fours championship. The quartet includes her husband, Jeff Pulli, and friends Rebecca Andrew and Jason Scott.

Invented in Scotland and extremely popular in Canada, the game wins new aficionados with each Winter Olympics, as TV viewers are introduced to curling’s strategic gamesmanship and learn its colorful terminology. Two teams of players compete by sliding 44-pound stones (known as “rocks”) across a sheet of ice toward a concentric target area (the “house”). Each team tries to get their stones as close to the center of the circle (the “button”) as they can, with points awarded for the number of stones that a team places closer to the button than their opponent’s nearest rocks.

Team members influence the path of each rock by using brooms to “sweep” the ice ahead of the rocks as the stones travel toward the house.

The skip is the strategist, dictating the placement of every shot to maximize scoring or prevent an opponent from scoring. Skips direct throwers where to aim each stone and how hard to throw it, and they tell sweepers when and where to sweep.

The skip also throws the last two shots of every “end” (similar to an “inning” in baseball) in a contest—often the most pressure-packed shots of the match.

“The most important skill a new curler needs to master is balance and touch,” Pulli says. “A great curler develops patiently over time by learning all the nuances of the game.”

Pulli grew up in Utica, New York, and was introduced to curling by her grandparents, who were members of a curling club. “I loved it right away,” she says.

A biology major at Rochester, she competed in junior nationals for three years while an undergraduate, finishing second in 1996. She met Jeff 10 years ago through curling. They were married five years ago and live in Rochester with their two daughters. Caitlin is a chemical and materials engineer for Xerox Corporation.

Mixed fours curling is not an Olympic sport, so there’s no ranking system. When Pulli was fully competing in women’s fours, her team was ranked second in the country. She was a silver medalist at the 2006 world championships and finished second in the 2010 Olympic Trials, just missing a chance to compete in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. “That was a heartbreaker,” she says.

She has competed in the US women’s championship 14 times and earned a gold medal in 2011. She also has four silver medals and one bronze.

She’s excited to train with her team for the world championships, where Canada, Sweden, Scotland, and Switzerland will be the favorites.

“Our goal will be to make the 16-team playoffs,” she says. “We won’t be a favorite, but there’s always a shot if you have a couple of great games in the playoffs.”

This article originally appeared in the spring 2022 issue of the Rochester Review magazine.