IN THE HOUSE: Carberry’s Calvert off to U18 event

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/03/2013 (4756 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The first big international curling event that Carberry’s Braden Calvert will play in had an excellent start, and he hopes it just gets better.

Calvert is in the Vancouver area to compete in the Optimist International Under-18 Curling Championship as the lead for Kyle Doering’s Manitoba squad.

They arrived a few days early and went to the Vancouver Canucks game on Tuesday night only to find that Calvert was seated right beside Niklas Edin and his Swedish men’s team that will compete in the world men’s curling championship in Victoria. Calvert never expected to sit beside the two-time world men’s bronze medallist, but it’s something he’ll remember.

“It was neat seeing someone who you watch on TV all the time and sit beside them and talk about curling and that,” he said from Langley, B.C. by telephone. “… You just don’t expect something like that to happen to you. It feels nice that it did.”

Now Calvert is hoping the rest of the U18 event, which starts today and wraps up on Sunday, can live up to that standard.

The team — which also features Colton Lott at third and Kyle Kurz at second — earned its spot at the U18s by winning the provincial U16 Asham 8-Ender event last year.

They’ve been put in a pool with teams from Washington State, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, the Northwest Territories and Japan. Manitoba hopes to pull out at least three wins and reach the playoffs.

Calvert knows it will be hard to make a game plan since some of these teams will be new to the Manitoba squad.

“We’ll just go out and play our own game,” he said. “They’ll be good competitors and give us really good games.”

Playing lead isn’t a familiar spot for Calvert. He’s been a skip for a while and led teams to provincial high school and under-18 championships this season in that role.

He hopes that playing lead this week will help give him a different perspective of the game, like what sweepers go through. Calvert hopes that perspective will help him next season when he returns to his new Winnipeg-based junior team, which he is skipping.

Calvert is also using this weekend as inspiration for his future, as he’d love to represent Manitoba at other national events in the future.

“It feels pretty neat (to have a bison on your back),” he said. “I could get used to that feeling for a while.”

FIREFIGHTERS NATIONALS: Manitoba split its two games at the Canadian Firefighters’ Curling Championship on Wednesday in St. John, N.B. The squad, which features Glenboro’s Daryl Bjornson at third, sits in seventh place at 4-4 after falling 9-8 in an extra end to New Brunswick and beating Prince Edward Island 9-4.

Manitoba is one game out of a four-way tie for third place and wraps up the round robin today against Northern Ontario (6-2) and Southern Ontario (5-3). The top four teams make the playoffs.

Cliff Cullen and Rob Gudnason, both from Glenboro, were supposed to be at the event but were forced to send replacements.

YOUTH JAMBOREE: Virden’s Brooks Freeman is skipping the lone Westman team competing in CurlManitoba’s Youth Jamboree, which runs in Winnipeg from today through Saturday. Freeman’s team — which includes Andrew Gerrand, Carson Langlois and Will Draper — is playing in the Youth Recreational (13 and under) event.

EXTRA ENDS: The Souris Survivor Bonspiel started yesterday and wraps up on Sunday … Killarney’s last chance open bonspiel runs from Friday through Sunday.