A record of 7-4, most years, is good for a playoff spot at the Tim Hortons Brier Canadian Men’s Curling Championships.
But, for the second year in a row, as the John Morris B.C. champion Vernon-Kelowna rink found out, 7-4 wasn’t enough to get past Mike McEwen of Manitoba (Winnipeg, 9-2), Brad Gushue of Newfoundland/Labrador (St. John’s, 9-2), Brad Jacobs of Northern Ontario (Sault Ste. Marie, 8-3) and Team Canada’s Kevin Koe (Calgary, 8-3).
Those four rinks qualified for the Page playoffs for the second straight year at the Mile One Centre in St. John’s, Nfld., which began Friday night wiht the one-versus-two battle between McEwen and Gushue. The winner gets a berth into Sunday’s final. The loser played the winner of the three-versus-four game Saturday between Koe and Jacobs.
Morris - backed by Vernon’s Jim Cotter throwing fourth stones, and the front end of lead Rick Sawatsky of Vernon and second Tyrel Griffith of Kelowna - won their final round-robin game Thursday night, 7-6 over Adam Casey of Saskatchewan, then needed Koe and Quebec’s Jean-Michel Menard to lose their final games Friday morning.
McEwen helped out, knocking off Menard 5-2. But Koe rallied to beat Mike Kennedy of New Brunswick 7-6, eliminating the B.C. champs.
“It’s disappointing,” said Cotter, like Sawatsky, appearing in his seventh Brier, Friday afternoon. “Every event you hope to make it to the playoffs and then it’s a new game. It was a super hard field, and we just needed to win one more game, have one break or one shot go our way.
“We had high expectations coming in.”
Cotter, Sawatsky and Griffith were curling in their fourth straight Brier but their first with Morris since making it to the final in 2014 in Kamloops, where they lost to Koe. Cotter went 5-6 in 2015 and 3-8 last year.
Cotter said the atmosphere at the Newfoundland Brier was “electrifying.”
“The crowds were phenomenal,” he said. “St. John’s put on a great show.”
The Morris rink has a spot in the Pinty’s Grand Slam of Curling’s Princess Auto Elite 10 event starting Thursday in Port Hawkesbury, NS, and hope to qualify for the two season-ending events, the WestJet Players Championship April 11 in Toronto, and the Humpty’s Champions Cup April 25 in Calgary.
Morris and company also remain in the hunt for a spot in the Tim Hortons Roar of the Rings – the Canadian Olympic Trials – Dec. 2-10 in Ottawa. The foursome lost the 2013 final to Jacobs, who went on to win Olympic gold in Sochi.
Meanwhile, Canada’s wheelchair curling team lost 5-4 to Norway in a tiebreaker on Friday and will not advance to the medal round of the 2017 World Wheelchair Curling Championship in Gangneung, South Korea.
After finishing the round-robin with a 5-4 record, Team Canada – skip Jim Armstrong, vice-skip Ina Forrest of Spallumcheen, second Marie Wright, lead Mark Ideson, alternate Ellis Tull and coach Wayne Kiel – fell behind early in the tiebreaker to determine who would go on to the Page 3 vs. 4 Playoff game. Trailing 4-1 at the break, Canada battled back with a single in five, and two straight steals, but it wasn’t enough to shut down Norway’s Jostein Stordahl.
The 2017 Wheelchair Worlds were to be the final event to determine the field that will play at the 2018 Winter Paralympics in PyeongChang. The combined results of the 2015, 2016 and 2017 World Championships decide the 11 teams that will play alongside the host South Korean team in 2018.
But based on the previous two years’ results, along with the makeup of the field for the 2017 Worlds, the field for 2018 is set, with Canada in the mix to take aim at our fourth consecutive Paralympic gold.
At the Gangneung Curling Centre this week, Canada was looking for its first world championship since Armstrong’s team prevailed in 2013 at Sochi. In that event, Armstrong, Forrest and Ideson teamed with Dennis Thiessen and Vernon’s Sonja Gaudet to claim gold.