It’s a typical league morning at the Denver Curling Club. All the sheets are full of curlers, brooms, and stones.
In the middle of one house, which is the big target curlers aim their stones at, is Dan Rose. From his wheelchair, he holds a broom in one hand while calling out commands to throw the stones
For many of the curlers on the ice, it’s a regular league day. But for Rose, it’s extra training as he prepares for his first Winter Paralympics in Milano Cortina.
USA Curling announced that Rose would be competing as a member of the wheelchair mixed curling team before Thanksgiving.
“It's been wild,” said Rose. The announcement during the holidays allowed him to spend time with friends and “just sort of take it all in and celebrate the achievement of making the team.” Since then, he’s been on the go with competitions.
Rose competes in a league with able-bodied curlers. As a Paralympian, Rose does not use a broom to sweep or guide the curling stone to its target. Instead, he uses a carbon fiber delivery stick, which takes more precision.
“In the sweeping, they can make the stone go a little bit further. They can kind of affect the path that the stone's going to take to avoid some guards or be a little bit more precise on a hit or a takeout. But for the wheelchair game, basically after we deliver the rock, we just have watch it go down. And whatever the physics on the rock are is going to make it go where it's going.”
“A lot of curling clubs have a mix, obviously, of wheelchair athletes or able-bodied athletes. A lot of wheelchair athletes have to be able to play with sweepers in league because that's who you have available to you,” said Clare Moores, an assistant coach for the USA’s Paralympic Wheelchair Curling teams based in the Denver area.
Moores said any ice time is beneficial when it comes to strategy in wheelchair curling.
“So being able to adjust what you're seeing and how you're calling a game and how you're calling strategy to, if you're playing with just para athletes or a mix of para and able-bodied or only able-bodied folks, I think being able to adjust to those different scenarios,” Moores said.
Beginnings
Rose was born and raised in Tomah, Wisconsin, a town of about 7,000 people. He grew up playing ice hockey.
He scored well on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) and admits that he took it just to get out of class. But, he ended up signing up for the US Army Reserves after graduating high school in 2003. While most people found basic training hard and mentally challenging, Rose thought it was fun.
“They're just trying to teach you how to be a soldier, and so, you're doing obstacle courses, you're doing weapons training and stuff like that,” Rose said. “Once you realize that the drill sergeants are there, they're yelling at you, they're screaming at you, but not because they don't like you, it's just because they need you to perform a certain way.”
During that time, he worked on railroad tracks. He earned a bachelor's degree in molecular biology and biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in 2008.
After graduating, Rose worked as a hand cutter on a logging crew. After fulfilling his six-year contract with the Army, he re-enlisted for another six years.
April 27, 2011, in Afghanistan
Rose worked as a combat engineer. He volunteered with the 428th Engineer Company stationed in Wausau, Wisconsin, which deployed to southern Afghanistan. His company was tasked with conducting Route Clearance in the Zhari District and Pajiwae of Kandahar Province. That meant they would look for improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
On April 27, 2011, Rose was serving as the truck commander while clearing out a newly-built route. He remembers his platoon traveling along the route in the rain.
“The terrain just turned into mire. There was only one paved road that went through the area. It was called Highway One, but we couldn't take our trucks off the normal routes that we would travel, just because they were so heavy, they were just sinking in the mud.”
Rose said the Taliban had filled in one of the culverts that was buried under the road with explosives. When their truck drove over it, the IED exploded. Rose said it ripped the truck into two pieces.
“I kind of remember coming to after that. I couldn't figure out why the windshield and the horizon weren't lining up,” Rose recalled. “I was in the front passenger seat. I was the vehicle commander, and I just was looking and I just couldn't make any sense of it.”
Rose and his platoon suffered concussions from the explosion. But he also remembers the conversation he had with his driver.
“Right away, I could hear my driver kind of groaning, and I asked, ‘Chris, what's up? What's going on?’ He's like, ‘You're standing on me.’ I was like,’ Oh, sorry.’ And I tried moving,” Rose said.
Rose told him to hit his legs. When his driver started hitting his legs, he knew right away that he was paralyzed. He doesn’t remember being loaded into a helicopter and flown back to Kandahar.
“It was probably eight hours after the fact that I finally started remembering things again, which is kind of crazy that there was a big gap in memory like that,” Rose said. “But it ended up that I was the worst injured out of the vehicle. It should have killed all three of us. So I mean, we're very fortunate, so we're definitely lucky to be here.”
Rose was flown from Afghanistan to Germany and then to Walter Reed, where he underwent spinal surgery. Eventually, he would make his way to a Veterans Affairs rehabilitation center in Tampa, Florida, for his recovery. He could’ve chosen to go to a VA hospital in Minneapolis, which was closer to his family in Wisconsin.
“I just needed a little bit of time to figure things out on my own before coming back to Wisconsin,” said Rose, “So Tampa ended up being the perfect fit for me.”
Rose’s mobility is a T4 level, which means his mobility and sensation end at his chest. He said his rehabilitation was more challenging physically than mentally.
“A lot of it was just learning how to balance. I don't have really any trunk or lower back to balance with, so it was learning how to basically use what I have to get around. Yeah, I mean, essentially it was just learning how to do everything again, but different.”
“I think the mental side of it, it was a little bit easier just because after my spinal surgery, I talked to the surgeon, and it was just how long until I can walk again? And he basically just told me flat out, he was like, ‘Yeah, your spinal cord's shot,’” Rose said. “That'll never happen, which was devastating to hear, but I think at the same time, it allowed me just to accept it and try and figure out, all right, this is what it's going to be, so I better get good at it. So it allowed me to just focus on what I needed to do to learn how to move around in a wheelchair.”
Rose eventually returned to Wisconsin and moved in with his parents. He described his new life as like being a kid all over again. But he also felt he was taking a step back in life.
“It was hard to get out and do things because most of the businesses (in the town) weren't necessarily fully accessible. My buddies would pick me up and carry me up any steps that we had to get into to get over to a friend's house or something. But it was definitely the hardest time. The world felt so small, and I felt like I was the only one in a wheelchair there,” Rose said. Fortunately, before he left Tampa, one of his recreational therapists signed him up to ski at the Hartford Ski Spectacular in Breckenridge.
A Colorado trip changed everything
Rose said going to Breckenridge was the best thing to happen to him. “I couldn't even envision how I would get down a mountain being paralyzed,” said Rose. “And I just remember I was afraid to try and go out and go skiing because I was like, “There's no way I can do it. This is impossible.” But getting out there, you work with some of the ski instructors, and they're like, ‘No, you can definitely do this.’ And they threw me into a ski and hauled me up on top of a mountain and it ended up being amazing. Then I realized I can do that, and it changed my mindset completely. ‘Alright, I can do this. What else can I do?’”
The trip also convinced him and his now-wife to move to Colorado full-time. Rose went on to compete in five different events at the 2018 National Veterans Wheelchair Games.
He began wheelchair curling after he moved to Denver. One of his friends in Wisconsin, who was a recreational therapist, said a couple guys were headed to Denver for a veteran wheelchair curling camp and were looking for more people to try the sport.
“I've driven past the curling club every time I go up into the mountains. So I thought, let's just see what it's all about,” Rose said. “So I came out, did that camp. I performed really well.
A month later, he was asked to join the development program for the national team. He was in the program for a year before he was named to his first national team in 2020. He had a great partner who trained and competed with him along the way.
Pam Wilson has competed in the sport since 2010. The semi-retired pediatrician won back-to-back national championships and a silver medal at the 2023 World Wheelchair Mixed Doubles Curling Championship. The pair qualified for the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, where they finished 5th.
Rose and Wilson have been playing together since 2019. They became mixed doubles partners only a couple of years ago. They finished runners-up at the 2025 national mixed doubles championship. Wilson didn’t qualify for Milano-Cortina. But she helped Rose train in the lead-up to the Games.
“She’s had a lot of success. So, it was awesome to have a partner who's been at that level, competed at that level and came home with actual hardware,” Rose said. “So, she just shared a lot of what it takes to get there, and hopefully she shared enough with me.”
When Rose is off the ice, he spends time with his wife Lisa and their daughter. He said Lisa motivates him to keep going back to the ice and keep trying.
“Last few years, I didn't make the worlds or whatever, and it's always tough when you don't make the team. She's like, just keep at it. You're right there. You just got to keep going. And so she's been the one who's motivated me to keep trying,” Rose said.
“And my daughter, she's two and a half now, so it's hilarious just to see her whenever she comes out and watches. She'll be standing on the other side of the glass, and every time I see her, she just pops her head up, starts waving and stuff or whatever. So it's always great.”
How did they do?
Rose and the USA Wheelchair Mixed Curling team were eliminated from the competition on Thursday after losing to Canada, 7-3. The team finished in ninth place with a 3-6 record.
