The Canadian Senior Men’s Curling Championships will be held in late March in Edmonton and Centretown’s Ottawa Curling Club will be sending their top team to represent the province in this national event.
Jeff McCrady, Brian Lewis, Mike Johansen and Graham Sinclair are the team representing Ontario. They will be competing against 14 teams from the provinces and territories, plus North Ontario. The week-long competition March 21.
To qualify for the championships, Ottawa’s team beat the Rideau Curling Club at the Ontario Senior Men’s Provincial Championships. McCrady and his team played that deciding game against the Rideau Curling Club, another Centretown-based club located five minutes away from McCrady’s home base, the Ottawa Curling Club, on O’Connor Street.
The game between McCrady’s team and the team from the Rideau Curling Club, skipped by Howard Rajala, was at the provincial championships in late February at the Glencoe and District Curling Club just outside of London.
Rajala says the game was a close call. “They got off to an early lead on us but we fought back and tied it up,” he says. Lewis, who plays third on the winning team, threw the game winning rock, but McCrady, the team’s skip, says he wasn’t nervous, he says that Lewis “should make that nine times out of 10.”
McCrady’s team won the game on the last rock in an extra end, meaning the game was tied after the standard eight games, so they played a tiebreaker.
“It’s a fun game, on the ice we’re both intense, we’re both trying to win, but we know it’s a game, and afterwards, still friends,” Rajala says about the rivalry. He says he’ll be rooting for McCrady’s team to win in Edmonton.
“The moment we do realize we’ve won it’s very exciting, but the next 24 hours after that it’s kind of get down to business,” says McCrady.