Everyday is Phill Drobnick’s reminder of his future, and a reflection of the past. A kid growing up in the Eveleth Curling Club. A 20-year tour of the international curling scene. A gold medal from the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang. 

It has been this way for nearly a month. His social media channels are a journey through his curling life into now, where live videos and updates from Cortina fill the screen. In August, Drobnick announced he would retire from coaching at USA Curling. One more Olympics was on the horizon. The hammer stone on the final end of a storied career. 

As a competitor, he won two state junior championships, then a national title in 2000, sending him to the World Junior Championships in Germany. He has two medals from the curling national championships and U.S. Olympic trials, respectively. Then he became the nation’s most decorated coach in the sport. 

“I think I’ll know it’s time,” Drobnick said in the days before leaving Minnesota for Italy in January. “I know it’s time. The feeling when it’s time.”

When Drobnick coached his first Olympics at Vancouver in 2010, USA Curling was more like a regional organization than one with national reach. Membership was in the low-five figures. The 2006 Olympic team won the nation’s first medal in the sport — a bronze in Turin — but curling remained niche in nature. 

The U.S. men’s team finished 10th in Vancouver. Immortalized as the “neighborhood curling team” of young up-and-comers rooted on the Iron Range and Duluth, rather than the catalyst for what was actually happening in the U.S. around the sport. 

The 2010 Games sparked something, and USA Curling saw membership rise at rates it had not seen after previous Olympics. Carl Lewis, a nine-time gold medalist in the Summer Olympics took an interest in the sport. Joe Biden, who was vice president at the time, had his picture taken with the team. More people were tuning in, starting clubs and signing up for memberships.

As the men’s and women’s curling teams take the ice this week, the first of many lasts have started for Drobnick. The last round robins. With the right breaks, the last playoffs. The Mixed Doubles team delivered another historic medal for the country, but he hopes it is not the last Olympic podium. Then the final closing ceremony.

“I always wanted to share our sport with everyone, help grow curling and I feel like we’ve been able to do that,” Drobnick said. “I have no doubt there will be a lot of emotions at the end, knowing that 20 years of my life has gone into this.”

Curling in the United States looks much different than it did when he first experienced the Olympics, and 2010 was just the start of the movement.  

An Olympic gold medal in 2018 launched it further into the consciousness of fans. John Shuster, a Chisholm native and skip of the team, was a flag bearer in 2022 at the Beijing Games. A professional curling league has formed with investment from NFL stars. Even the Kelces are sweeping the rock. 

This is a phenomenon mostly unfamiliar to the modern U.S. sports scene. The transition from another nation’s sport to sustained cultural relevancy here is something Americans are used to passing on to its neighbors. Not the other way around.

The 1992 Dream Team and Michael Jordan ignited interest in basketball across the globe. The NFL has laid claim to games in Europe and South America, and now flag football will join the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles. The X Games helped usher in new Olympic competitions like snowboarding. 

To the casual observer, it’s easy to underestimate Drobnick’s impact on the game. The coach behind the scenes as the athletes display their talents for the world to see. The connection point for clubs looking to host events and grow. Maybe it is part of the job. Maybe it is just the Iron Ranger in him. 

Inside the sport, it cannot be overstated enough.

“We’re obviously very proud to have him, and to be able to say Phill Drobnick is from our club,” said Stephanie Dowell, president of the Curl Mesabi club in his hometown of Eveleth. “His impact has been great, incredible. I think that really says a lot about his character, about him as a coach, how he always put the team first and made sure they were getting the accolades, and he was there to support them.”

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There was a plan in place for Snoop Dogg this year, and it involved the late Sen. Paul Wellstone. 

To understand how the gangsta rapper-turned-everything-spokesperson and Minnesota’s own version of Bernie Sanders fit into curling is to understand the lessons of 2010. Drobnick was a young coach. Team Shuster a young squad.

Life on the Olympic stage comes at you quickly sometimes. 

Curling in the U.S. is still relatively local in its major competitions. National championships are not packed arenas with tens of thousands of fans and national media air time. There’s no Super Bowl vibe. No confetti. No laps around the ice with the Stanley Cup following a win. 

The Olympics are a beast of its own due to the sheer magnitude of the event, the travel, celebrities, politicians and star athletes. The distractions are plenty enough, then you have to compete on the biggest stage of your life. 

“We basically were an open book [in 2010] and kept everything pretty loose … we had so many distractions that we didn’t really know were distractions,” Drobnick said. “The lights are always on, the cameras are always rolling and it’s different. It’s expect the unexpected. There’s no way to really prepare for an Olympic Games other than playing in an Olympics Games.”

For decades, the U.S. curling teams have traveled the world and won medals largely on the same budget as previous years. The national teams wrap at the year’s end and go back to day jobs, where other traditional curling countries have larger funding pools and are more professionalized in nature. It was a baked-in disadvantage of sorts.

The exposure to the world stage has started to change that dynamic. A professional curling league is a start, and athletes are dedicating more time and energy into their bodies than years before. It is also experience at the high levels that is growing the national teams’ confidence in bringing home more Olympic hardware.

Here is where Wellstone plays in. 

Drobnick and the teams have been filing away lessons of the past 20 years. They are leveraging the shared experiences toward what is best for Team USA at the end of the day. Not just a team-by-team endeavor. To put it as Wellstone’s campaign slogan did: “We all do better when we all do better.”

This year, perhaps more than any other, is a testament of the one-team mentality Drobnick has been instilling within USA Curling. Three teams qualified in the men’s, women’s and mixed doubles competitions. More than half of the players are making their Olympic debuts. It is the sign of a thriving program, and the changing of the guard, so to speak, put on display via his teachings.

“If you know curling, you know how important a coach is to making sure the team is cohesive, that they play well together and that issues are addressed,” Dowell, of Curl Mesabi said. “Just keep everything flowing and the good curling happening.”

Danny Casper is only 24 years old and he will skip the men’s national team in Cortina. He battled through Guillain-Barré Syndrome, in which the body’s immune system attacks the nerves, that sidelined him for much of the 2024-25 season. They finished second at the national championships in 2025, narrowly missing out on the title. 

Shuster, a five-time Olympian, brought Casper to the Pan Continental Curling Championships as his team’s alternate. A few months later, Team Casper ended Shuster’s chance at one more Olympic run, but the mentorship between the skips has continued leading up to the Winter Games. 

Chris Plys, a two-time Olympian and Team Shuster member, joined Drobnick in Italy to help teams prepare. Three members of the women’s national team — Tabitha Peterson, Tara Peterson and Cory Thiesse — are Olympic veterans. Thiesse was also the mixed doubles partner for Korey Dropkin.

“We’re at that moment where it’s taken a long time, but we finally got there,” Drobnick said. “It shows with the way John has really just helped mentor Danny’s team, and Chris has come in and had numerous meetings with them to prepare them for what’s unexpected.”

Snoop Dogg was in attendance at the curling arena last week. He met with Team USA wearing a shirt emblazoned with Dropkin’s face on it. They tried to teach “Coach Snoop” how to curl. Thiesse and Dropkin won their fourth straight round robin match that day on their way to a silver medal. 

USA Curling is no longer the plucky underdog story of misfit toys.

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In October last year, seven teams competing in the Milano Cortina Games descended on the Iron Range for the 2025 Pan Continental Curling Championships. Drobnick’s home club was on the world stage, highlighting Curl Mesabi for the second time in a year on the U.S. curling circuit and showcasing a new arena in Virginia. 

Growing the game in this nook of northeastern Minnesota, and across the state, has been a focus for the coach. Last year’s national championships were held in Duluth and the USA Curling operations center out of the Twin Cities. 

Dowell sees the efforts not only in the events Drobnick helps bring to the region, but also the Curl Mesabi Foundation, which he helped establish to promote curling activities broadly across the Iron Range. Its work includes sending floor curling kits to local schools and junior curlers to camps. This year, the foundation is also helping the club host its Olympics watch party.

“They’ve just been instrumental in making sure that curling is spread far and wide,” she said. “We have the Olympics, and curling always gets very popular then.”

Retirement in sports can be a fickle business. Olympians are often off the scene before their 30s. Top professionals hang on until their bodies can no longer perform to expectations, often leaving nostalgic peaks as their legacy and the late years thankfully forgotten. There is no road map for amateurs or professionals, and the same goes for coaches at all levels. Few get a chance to impact the sport when the limelight dims. 

Drobnick expects to stay with USA Curling in a support role, where the grind of travel and being at the arena will give way to more time in life. He will miss the competition. Working directly with the athletes.

Promoting curling at home on the Iron Range is a priority. He wants a major event here, and Dowell is hopeful for the same. They showed the world what the region has to offer and Drobnick is the right guy to have in its corner.

“I’m happy with the legacy that we’ve left with the sport, and I feel like it’s in good hands for the people that come in and take over,” he said. “I’m not going to go far, and I’m still going to do everything to promote curling on the Iron Range because that’s near and dear to my heart.”

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As Drobnick sorted through photos of his career, images of the fresh-faced curler were mixed in with the veteran coach. Everyone was there with him.

The Olympic Village takes on a family atmosphere for teams. They go out together. Eat together. Bond off the ice so they can better know each other on it. They celebrate and commiserate together. A home away from home in some sense.

Family has been the center of Drobnick’s curling life since he started in the sport around the age of 6. Leagues in Eveleth were the launching point. The family support system in place as he competed, then coached and planned competitions. His parents and other family were always somewhere in the crowd, even if Drobnick himself was just the observer.

Home and family were never far behind when he left.

“My dad taught me how to curl, and I curled in leagues with my dad and both my grandpas,” he said. “From a small town to be able to travel the world like I have, I’ve been able to see places I’ve never expected to see. Being able to wear that flag on your back, and every time you do it, there’s so much pride in being able to do it.”

The long stretches away from his family are leading him into retirement. He has missed too many games. Too many home-cooked meals and family conversations. He knows it is the time to step away. Time to dedicate himself to the thing that means more than curling.

Drobnick’s wife, Shannon, flew to Italy to be part of the final Olympic run. His youngest son, Isaac, joined him one night at home as he reminisced through the photos. He had an idea for the coach.

If Drobnick held off retirement just four more years, the pitch went, Isaac will make sure he can join him for the 2030 French Alps Games.

“I said, ‘Oh, buddy, no. There’s no four more years,’” he said.

Perhaps a wise choice, as Salt Lake City hosts the 2034 Winter Olympics, so what’s another four more at that point? The plane ride is less than three hours, after all.

But they struck a deal to get Isaac to the Games. It’s a four-hour flight. In the U.S. The weather will be much more favorable.

They’ll start a new set memories for the next 20 years, and attend the 2028 Summer Olympics together in Los Angeles.