The last shot in the extra end of Sunday’s stick final at the St. Albert Curling Club declared Alberta’s rep at nationals.
The duo of Tony VanBrabant and Scott Holland watched with trepid anticipation while Tom Steele was locked in on the shot rock that was slightly visible behind coverage as his partner Al Schultz put the broom in place for the game-ending delivery and the score knotted after six ends.
The rock slowly spun its way down sheet four while curling towards the centre of the house but upon impact jammed the shot rock back onto another rock and Steele’s shooter veered off to the side for VanBrabant and Holland to steal the winning point.
The grand finale marked the third game of the day between the twosomes after the St. Albert tag-team of Steele and Schultz beat VanBrabant, who does the bulk of his curling in Legal, and the Morinville-based Holland in the A final before the tables were turned in the B final to set the stage for the too close to call sticky situation.
“It’s absolutely amazing. I’m so pleased. It’s awesome,” VanBrabant exclaimed after the presentation of the Alberta Stick Curling Championship trophy sponsored by Milt and June McDougall of St. Albert.
“We both worked really well together and I’m really thankful that I have a teammate like Scott.”
“I’m very surprised actually. We just went into it to have fun,” Holland added. “Tony played really well and we got lucky at the end and won.”
VanBrabant and Holland will now rock the ice at nationals, March 23 to 26 in New Glasgow, N.S.
“What do we have to lose? We’re going there to have fun,” Holland said of the unexpected trip to the Maritimes. “It’s pretty exciting. I’ve only curled stick for three years so for me it’s all kind of new and I’m sure enjoying it right now.”
Visit www.albertastickcurling.ca for provincial results.
This year’s inaugural provincial format is different from the previous Alberta Sturling championships where the stone can be delivered by a stick or by sliding out of the hack.
The St. Albert-hosted competition featured stick deliveries from a standing or sitting (wheelchair) position.
All games consisted of six ends. One member of each team stays at each end of the rink and the two delivering curlers alternately deliver six stones each per end as their teammates skip that end and then the roles are reversed.
Holland, 61, discovered the stick game after retirement.
“I hadn’t curled for 40 years before I started with a stick. I didn’t even bother getting into the hack I just went straight to the stick when I retired,” said the father of former NHL defenceman Jason Holland.
VanBrabant, 65, initially hung up his curling broom after experiencing difficulties coming out of the hack before returning to the roaring game as a stick thrower.
“I found the stick much easier (to deliver the rock) so five years ago I started and progressively since then I’ve just loved the game,” VanBrabant said.
Schultz, 62, wasn’t a stick curler but Steele “roped me into playing with him because he had nobody to play with” at provincials when Steele’s wife, Barb, was unable to curl after breaking her elbow at Christmas time.
Schultz, who replaced Steele’s original recruit, Gregg Donnelly, through a sketchy coin flip, borrowed a stick and after a three-game tryout with Steele the St. Albert 50-plus mixed league curler was good to go.
“They always say the hardest part about stick is the draw weight and I actually wasn’t having any problem with draw. I found the hardest part was more with trying to hit your broom with takeout because you tended to float them, or I did anyway,” Schultz said. “With stick it’s pure release and there is no sweeping so if you’ve got really, really good draw weight you’ll win most of your games and we had excellent draw weight the whole bonspiel.”
Stick curling is a thriving sport.
“We have I think 96 in the (St. Albert) Friday stick league and obviously it’s very popular when you take a look at the size of this bonspiel,” Schultz said. “Stick curling has really prolonged the careers of regular curlers who have bad knees and so on so it’s great to see all these people come out here and continue to curl and they can curl well into their 80s and even 90s.”
Steele and Schultz lost only two times at provincials but a win in either game would have punched their tickets to nationals.
“I’m not a stick curler so my expectation this weekend was to win one game and if we did that I thought we would be doing good,” Schultz said.
After the A final, VanBrabant and Holland devised a game plan to counter the red-hot Steele/Schultz combination.
“They thumped us in the first game we played them so we kind of changed our strategy a little bit and got them to hit and once we did that it worked out a little bit better for us,” Holland said.
VanBrabant agreed.
“They played very well. Their draw is phenomenal so we were chasing them,” VanBrabant said of the losing the A final. “After the game Scott and I talked and we said we can’t let them get the lead. We need to get ahead so we need to try a different strategy on them and we started using takeouts and it worked for us. The second game we were able to get on top with our game and at that point I had a feeling we could beat them in the third game but it would be a tough game.”
The B final was a lopsided win in five ends as VanBrabant and Holland stole the majority of their points.
“We had nothing to lose so we went in there and played our hardest,” VanBrabant said.
Schultz summed up the loss.
“We weren’t making any shots. We didn’t execute,” he said. “If we would’ve won the B game then we would’ve won outright.”
The second crack at nationals for Steele and Schultz was a better effort but the result was still the same.
“Anytime it goes to an extra end it’s a great game,” Schultz said of the A-B tilt. “It was kind of back and forth but the best team won I guess.
“They’re a really good team.”
Each side swapped three-enders leading up to the extra end.
“When we managed to sneak a three ender on them that really brought up our spirits and I think that was the TSN turning point because we knew we could get some points on them,” VanBrabant said.
Steele, 68, was expecting the game to be tighter than a drum and he was correct.
“It was a tough game for anyone to lose because everybody was playing so well. There were lots of good shots from both teams,” Steele said. “We got up three so that gave us a little bit of wind and then they took three back on us. They were just tenacious and in the sixth end they made a great shot (by Holland) to tie it up.”
In the extra end, Steele attempted to duplicate VanBrabant’s previous shot for the winning point.
“I watched it pretty closely but Tony’s rocks curl a little bit more than I do so I knew what ice he took,” Steele said. “I was thinking if I’m light it will curl because we had a couple of rocks that overcurled on that end so I was just conscious of that and I didn’t want to overthrow it because it wouldn’t move at all.
“Al was yelling it was outside and it didn’t matter if it was outside because I knew I was lighter than he expected me to be and then it did curl and it started to come.
“I’m thinking OK we made the shot and then dang it, it jammed into the one in the back and on the other side of the sheet even.
“You could shoot that thing 16 times and never come close to it but it was there.”
The four curlers in the match are grandfathers with a total of 17 grandchildren, including eight for Steele.
