At Paralympics, U.S. curlers Steve Emt and Laura Dwyer are right where they belong
· Yahoo Sports
CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Laura Dwyer doesn’t need a sticky note anymore. Her ritual reminder as she takes the ice is coded in a thin chain around her neck and ingrained in her thoughts.
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What started as a custom at a camp last summer when someone posed the question, “Why aren’t you more confident?” has evolved into a mantra for the first-time Paralympian wheelchair curler. A Midwesterner through and through, Dwyer nodded her head, deferring to the idea that too much confidence could be perceived as arrogance. She heard the refrains that her confidence would help her own all her shots better.
They went so far as to say, “You belong here,” and urged her to echo the refrain.
Dwyer squeaked the words. Her friend made her repeat it, and since August, Dwyer had been writing the words “I belong here” on a Post-it as a reminder. She’d stick it on a wall, the bench, whatever surface the adhesive could find. At the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic team trials in November, she was told to move it because of broadcast restrictions. That’s when the team’s head ice technician, Shawn Olesen, sent the message home.
“He, like, Obi-Wan Kenobi-ed me,” Dwyer said. “He was like, ‘Laura, it is within you now. You don’t need it anymore. You know you belong here without the paper.'”
This Christmas, Dwyer’s sister-in-law gifted her a necklace, but rather than a pendant attached, the necklace came with the dots and dashes of morse code that spells out, “I belong here.”
“No matter where I go, because I don’t need to put the sign out, I’m wearing, ‘I belong here,’ so I can remind myself,” Dwyer said.
Where Dwyer belongs is at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Paralympics, partnered with three-time Paralympian Steve Emt representing the United States in the debut of the mixed doubles event at the Games. After four games of their seven-game round-robin schedule, they’re 2-2 and in a five-way tie for second place. The top four teams advance to the knockout round.
The two, whom Team USA’s national director of the wheelchair program, Pete Annis, calls “pretty much the same person,” have different journeys to the sport, but they could be the United States’ best chance to bring home its first wheelchair curling medal.
Dwyer was paralyzed in a freak accident in 2012. She was working as a landscaper, and a 1,000-pound tree branch fell from 40 feet up. Emt was paralyzed at age 25 after a car accident as a result of his drinking and driving. Emt didn’t find curling until 2013. Dwyer found the sport in late 2019 through a flyer at the gym for an adaptive curling clinic when she was missing the active part in her life.
The pair first met at a Team USA camp in February 2020 — Dwyer didn’t realize the team was there as she was just trying to understand more how to play the sport. But even from that first moment, Emt had confidence in Dwyer, telling her to keep throwing stones.
Around two years ago, when Emt and Dwyer “broke up” with their curling mixed doubles partners, they were drawn to each other thanks to their competitive athletic backgrounds. Dwyer played softball, while Emt played basketball at West Point and finished his college career as a walk-on at UConn under Hall of Famer Jim Calhoun.
As Dwyer said of Emt, “His mental state, when it comes to sport, that he was prepared in a way like I was, how to get through a rough game, or how to push hard when someone else isn’t up to par, or even when you know I’m having a bad day or he’s having a day, we knew how to work through it in a similar fashion.”
Their first mixed doubles tournament in Scotland didn’t go well.
“We were both just pissed off,” Emt said. “Like we hated this, like we’re done. I’m never doing this again. I hate this game, you know, get us out of Scotland as soon as possible.”
Their coach gave them a dose of perspective and the reminder that they’d learn.
“Now it’s, I don’t want to do anything else,” Emt said. “All I want to do is to travel with Laura around the world and compete in mixed doubles.”
The pair has been doing that, finishing ninth at the world championships to help finalize the United States’ qualification for the 2026 Paralympics.
Both have put in major work and established routines. Their pregame warmup is based on the mixed team routine. Their postgame one, they worked on with an assistant coach — using a sheet of paper to recognize turning points in the game when something good happens, along with a “do again” and “do better” section.
“It’s that accountability that I think in some sports falls through the cracks, where someone has a (bad) game and they don’t say it, and then a teammate recognizes it, and there’s resentment that builds, and then there’s animosity,” Dwyer said. “Steve and I are like, ‘No, we will not.’ We both work really hard in our relationships in our lives to have open lines of communication.”
It’s the art of the process where Emt and Dwyer align, and it has been necessary in helping them reset and keep moving forward. Some of that started with Emt, who calls himself a drunk driver rather than a curler. To him, the sport is simply something he does. Once Emt worked through those emotions of his car accident and started forgiving himself, he started speaking to high schools across the country about the dangers of drinking and driving. A year ago, Dr. Matt Mikesell — a sport psychologist who works with USA Curling through a contract with Premier Sports Psychology — asked Emt how he feels when he walks off the stage once finished with speaking.
“‘Doc, I am fired up. I am so ready to go, and I feel 100 percent great,'” Emt remembers telling Mikesell, who he’s worked with more closely for about two years. “Whether I’m sick, it doesn’t matter, because I know I just gave my best, and I know I impacted others. But even if I didn’t, I still know that I gave my best, and that’s all I have control of. And he’s like, ‘Steve, we need to get you feeling like that when you come off the ice.'”
Mikesell and Emt had check-ins as he got off the ice and worked on that feeling to control what he could control.
“Now, whether he’s there or not, I make sure I check in with myself, ‘Hey, was this a good training session?'” Emt said. “Even if it wasn’t, again positive self-talk: ‘Yeah, I went through my process, and it’s all good.’ … This game is 95 percent mental, so we got to train the brain, and we’ve done that in the last year and a half.”
The goal is the program’s first gold medal. But even with that outcome in sight, the emphasis is on process.
That’s already been in play these Games. Their voices echo across the four sheets of ice inside the Cortina Curling Olympic Stadium. Even amid the crowd noise and the other ongoing three matches, the two make a point to meet after ends for a quiet moment and practice their box breathing — resetting with four seconds of inhaling, holding for four seconds and exhaling for four seconds.
They also met each other away from the ice over lunch on Thursday to regroup after not feeling like themselves in their first two matchups. They chatted about their communication, thought process, and tightening up to get back to their basics.
“We’re the best team in the United States of America, one of the best teams in the world, you know,” Emt said. “And we got there for a reason. Let’s go back to the way we were. Do these things that got us here.”
Where they both belong.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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