Team USA's Paralympic Curling Team Picked Lakeville as Its Home Ice

TLDR

• Lakeville was chosen as the host site for Team USA's Paralympic curling team, a council member announced Monday.
• The athletes live all over the country. They'll come to Lakeville a handful of times a year to train together at Dakota Curling.
• Their coach, Pete Annis, lives in Owatonna, which is part of why Minnesota made sense.
• The bigger goal: land a large international competition in Lakeville.
• It came up almost as an afterthought at the very end of the Sept. 21 council meeting.
• Update: Dakota Curling says it's a non-binding partnership with USA Curling, the last camp was Sept. 18–20, and the public is welcome to watch.

Monday's Lakeville City Council meeting was mostly about a World's Fair, a new Goodwill, and semis parked on residential streets. Then, with about a minute left before adjournment, a council member mentioned something that got maybe thirty seconds of airtime.

"Lakeville was chosen to be the host site for the Paralympic curling team," he said. "It's a big deal for us."

He wasn't wrong, and almost nobody caught it.

What Actually Got Announced

Team USA's Paralympic curling team — that's wheelchair curling, the only curling discipline in the Winter Paralympics — now has Lakeville as its host site for training.

Here's how the council member described it. The team is four men and women. They all live in different parts of the country, and they train on their own at their home clubs. But a few times a year they need to get together and practice as an actual team, and that's what Lakeville will host.

Their coach lives in Owatonna. "So they use our curling club," he said.

That's Dakota Curling, the club on Holt Avenue in downtown Lakeville. He thanked the convention and visitors bureau, the chamber, and the club for making it happen.

Why This Is More Than a Feel-Good Story

Up until now, Team USA's wheelchair curlers have been nomads. In the run-up to the 2026 Paralympics in Italy, the team practiced almost every weekend for three months — in Madison, in Milwaukee, in Denver, wherever athletes could borrow their home clubs. That's according to the Owatonna People's Press, which profiled the team's director and coach, Pete Annis of Owatonna, before the Games.

So a national team that's been bouncing between borrowed sheets of ice now has one place it comes back to. That place is Lakeville.

And the council member said the ambition doesn't stop there. The goal is to bring "a large competition, international competition" to the host site.

A Little Context on the Team

Team USA's wheelchair curlers came home from the March 2026 Paralympics in Milan-Cortina without a medal, but it was close. In mixed doubles, Laura Dwyer and Steve Emt lost the bronze medal game to Latvia 11-10 in an extra end. Fourth place, by one stone, in an extra end.

In September, USA Curling named its 2026-27 wheelchair national team after a selection camp in Colorado: Steve Davis, Laura Dwyer, Steve Emt, Emily Obert, Sean O'Neill, Shawn Sadowski, Jeff Snover and Katie Verderber. Pete Annis is the national wheelchair program director.

Next Winter Paralympics: 2030. Which means the training that happens in Lakeville over the next few years is training for that.

Why Dakota Curling

Dakota Curling started in 2006, back when the club didn't have a building and rented ice on Sundays. Today it runs six sheets in a converted building of about 26,000 square feet in downtown Lakeville, with a club room, a bar, and food service. It's the only dedicated curling club south of the river in the Twin Cities.

The club's own description of its programs is worth noting here: leagues and drop-in curling "designed to accommodate players of all ages, experience levels and physical abilities."

It's also not the club's first brush with the national scene. Dakota hosted the U.S. Mixed Curling Championship in 2018 and a World University Games qualifier in 2025.

For the record, Minnesota already has USA Curling's official National Training Center — that's in Chaska, named back in 2021. What Lakeville got is something different and specific to the Paralympic side of the sport.

Update: What Dakota Curling Told Us

Updated Sept. 24, 2026. After this story ran, Dakota Curling Club president Jerry Schimmel reached out to fill in the gaps. Curling is a humble sport, he said, and the club usually doesn't shout unless it's asking a teammate to sweep. Here's what he told us about what the club calls the National Center of Excellence for USA Wheelchair Curling.

It's a partnership, not a formal designation. Schimmel described it as a non-binding agreement between USA Curling and Dakota Curling Club. The two sides agree to support each other and build up each other's programs, facilities and awareness for Paralympic curling. It isn't a locked-in, multi-year contract.

The most recent camp was Sept. 18–20. The team was in Lakeville last weekend. The next dates are still being worked out, and the club plans to share them once they're set.

Yes, you can watch. Dakota Curling is open to the public whenever it's open, and that includes when the national team is on the ice. Schimmel said the club will do a better job of posting camp dates on social media. In the meantime, leagues run October through May, generally from 5 to about 9:30 p.m., so you can stop in most evenings to see the building and watch some curling. The club also streams leagues daily, and sometimes scrimmages, on its YouTube channel, Curling Stadium Dakota.

No word yet on an international event. Schimmel declined to comment on the "large international competition" the council member mentioned, but he thanked the council for its support of curling in Lakeville.

If you want to try the sport yourself in the meantime, Dakota Curling runs learn-to-curl classes at the start of each session.

The Bottom Line

A national team picked our town. It got about thirty seconds at the end of a three-hour meeting, sandwiched between a fire relief investment report and a reminder about absentee voting. Keep an eye on this one — if the club and the CVB land an international event, that's a real tourism story for Lakeville.

More Lakeville news: the city is being considered to host Expo 2031, the council is moving to ban semis and unhitched trailers from city streets, and downtown just got its first bike shop.