#SoCaltech: Derek Surka

“I grew up in Canada, outside Niagara Falls, in a town called Welland. Curling is part of the culture there—my dad curled, and I curled in high school. When I went to Caltech, I thought I would never curl again, but after grad school, I ended up in a small town in New Jersey. By coincidence, a childhood friend of mine was in the same area and was curling. We reconnected, and I took it up again. It’s a great social sport. I got my wife into it after we got married, and she became very, very good—we curled together competitively at the national level.

In 2010, NBC was looking for a statistician for curling to help them, and the US Curling Association put my name forward. They interviewed me, and I convinced them I knew enough about the sport and knew what they were expecting me to have in terms of stats, and they said, ‘Well, do you want to do this?’ And now this is my fifth Olympics.

It’s really fun to be able to pull out interesting pieces of information that help tell the story of the athletes and the storyline of the games and make it interesting for the viewers. I’m always looking for something that hasn’t happened before, or a trend a team broke. For example, at these Olympics, for the first time in any Olympic curling event, a team was shut out. But the very next game, that same team [Sweden’s mixed-doubles curling team] set the record for the most points scored—and five games later, they had gold medals around their necks.”

Derek Surka (BS ’94) is currently serving at NBC as a statistician for its coverage of the sport of curling. Semiretired after a 30-year career in aerospace engineering, Surka lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife, Charrissa Lin, and is writing a novel set in the world of curling.

#SoCaltech is an occasional series celebrating the diverse individuals who give Caltech its spirit of excellence, ambition, and ingenuity. Know someone we should profile? Send nominations to magazine@caltech.edu.