Randy in the Rings: Smaller parade of post-secondary teams celebrate incredible week of curling

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Ultimately, the 2023 U Sports-CCAA Curling Championships wrapped up on Sunday much in the same manner they opened mid-week.

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But rather than the full complement of 32 post-secondary teams from across the country being paraded out on to the decked out ice surface of the Gerry McCrory Countryside Sports Complex, we were down to just a dozen, the three medal-winning rinks in each of the four divisions.

Included in that grouping was the Laurentian Voyageurs women’s team of Bella Croisier, Piper Croisier, Abby Deschene, Julia Deklein and Katie Vanderloo, who bounced back from a tough morning semifinal loss to the Dalhousie Tigers, 10-6, to claim bronze with a 6-5 win over the Memorial Sea-Hawks.

“After the (semifinal) game, we kind of came together as a team and talked about our performance,” outlined Piper Croisier. “Ultimately, we decided to go into our last game of U Sports nationals with less pressure on our shoulders and less stress and ultimately have fun, because that’s really what we are all here to do.”

In fact, there remains more fun ahead on the calendar for the Croisier sisters, who will be joined by teammates Celeste Gauthier and Dominique Vivier at the 2023 New Holland Canadian U21 Men’s and Women’s Curling Championships in Rouyn-Noranda, Que., from March 26 to April 2.

In that sense, the university nationals as a lead-in more than served a purpose.

“It’s just that high level of competition,” Piper stressed. “There were a lot of great teams from right across Canada and ultimately, that’s just what we are going to see next week at U21 nationals.”

In a U Sports gold-medal women’s classic, Dalhousie Tigers skip Marin Callaghan successfully plucked out an opposing stone on the button only to see it jam on the other side of the rings, sitting as the counter as Serena Gray-Withers and the Alberta Pandas pulled off a 5-4 win in an extremely well-played encounter.

And but for literally a millimetre or two, the ladies could easily have been joined by the LU men’s team of Jake Horgan, Olivier Bonin-Ducharme, Derek Leung, Samuel Branconnier and Owen Allard.

Horgan can commiserate with Callaghan as his raised-angle takeout attempt in the extra end of the morning semifinal missed by the width of a couple of hairs, with the team making it back-to-back heartbreakers with a 6-5 bronze-medal loss to the Queen’s Gaels on the heels of their 5-4 11th-end loss to Dalhousie in the morning.

A veteran of the team in his fifth and final year, Leung was understandably choked up as the final curtain fell.

“Honestly, it was a great experience: great team, great fans, great atmosphere,” said the young man who played for Team Hong Kong from 2016 to 2019 and completed his masters in Scotland before returning to Laurentian to earn his PhD.

“We had two really, really tight games and that’s really all you can ask for, to play your heart out and leave everything on the ice.”

Now in his third year of his PhD, Leung is the consummate student-athlete, a role he appreciates now more than ever.

“I really like that we are not just athletes but also students,” he said. “We’re all working towards degrees, super busy — we are full-time students — and we also get to go out and represent our universities.”

In the men’s gold-medal affair, the Wilfrid Laurier Hawks defended their title with a completely new rink as the team of Sam Mooibroek, Kibo Mulima, Wyatt Small, Ben Pearce and Codie Harris stopped Dalhousie for a second straight day, taking the final by a count of 9-7.

Much like the Laurier rink, the OCAA’s Humber Hawks can boast the type of curling resume that leaves no doubt that they should be in the running at nationals. Skip Jacob Dobson returned last month from the Swiss Juniors Cup, having captured the Canadian Junior Cup in December to earn the trip to Europe.

Vice Austin Snyder was in Germany as recently as three weeks ago, representing Canada at the World Junior Curling Championships. Second Noah Garner was named to the first all-star team at the OCAA championships last month, where Humber finished second to the Mohawk Mountaineers — so it really did not surprise a whole lot of folks that the Hawks followed up a 6-1 run in round-robin play with ultra-solid victories over both the Sault College Cougars, 8-4, and SAIT Trojans, 10-3, on Sunday.

“We finished second at our provincials, but we have all had highly competitive seasons, across the board, and we knew that we did not perform our best at that event,” said Dobson, a native of Haliburton. “We knew coming into this event that we could do a lot more. We had a job to do.

“Everyone is so committed to this. These guys deserve every bit of this gold.”

Even after settling for silver, the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology Trojans could not have been more proud — this from their coach, a woman who knows a thing or two about the game of curling.

“We have a lead who just learned to curl 10 weeks ago and our second is only in his second year of curling,” noted Trojans head coach Shannon Kleibrink, skip of the bronze medal-winning Canadian entry at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy.

“There’s going to be some misses, but I am really proud that they played this well, considering their level of experience.”

That said, skip Ben Helston is an experienced and impressive rock thrower, something that was evident as the 0-2 Trojans overcame a 7-2 deficit against Mohawk with three ends to play earlier in the week.

“That’s one of the best comebacks I have ever seen,” Kleibrink stated. “Our skip made two incredible shots: an in-off and a split that I didn’t even think was there for four. That turned the sails around and we started to believe that we had a chance.”

The Mountaineers took bronze in the CCAA men’s bracket, upending the Sault College Cougars 9-3 on Sunday afternoon, while the Augustana Vikings, skipped by Josie Zimmerman, upset the Niagara Knights 5-4 to claim collegiate gold, with the Concordia Thunder leaving Sudbury with bronze medals in tow, doubling Humber 8-4 in their final game.

The Sudbury Star will feature special editions of Randy in the Rings throughout the national curling championships in Sudbury, including the Canadian mixed doubles championship being held this week.