Skip taking his game to the next level

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This article was published 08/10/2015 (3964 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

 

When they first got together, Reid Carruthers and his teammates figured they’d just look to make some shots, have fun and see how far they could take it.

Then they won, toppling titan Mike McEwen to clinch the 2015 Manitoba men’s curling championship in a stunner debut.

For round two? It’s game on.

“Last year, I went from being on a very serious team,” said Carruthers, who spent five seasons on Jeff Stoughton’s front end. “So I wanted to just have fun. We had some pretty awesome success, but there was areas we could grow on and get better at.

 

“If you want to be a top two or three team in the world, and be that consistent, you have to look at all aspects of your game.”

So Wednesday, Carruthers announced his team had joined forces with its first full-time coach, former Brier champion Dan Carey. They couldn’t get on the ice over the summer, but the skip, third Braeden Moskowy, second Derek Samagalski and lead Colin Hodgson hired a sports psychologist and a personal trainer.

Get the body right, get the head right. Does that regimen sound familiar? McEwen’s team did those things the year before. More and more, it’s what elite curlers must do to keep pace with a field that includes fitness buffs such as John Morris and Brad Jacobs.

This is where curling is going, and sometimes it looks like the most genteel arms race ever.

“For us, we want to not just keep up with (McEwen’s team), but beat them on a regular basis,” Carruthers said. “They’re an amazing team and our biggest competitor. So it’s about catching up and hopefully surpassing them.”

The professionalization of curling is accelerating, in large part because of rivalries such as these.

When former Curl Manitoba president Resby Coutts was playing in his heyday, “We were just four guys who would get in the car and go play,” Coutts said. “We never thought of these things, but no one else did either.”

Now, with the Olympics and sponsorships and some big-money events on the line, “the rewards are so much greater,” Coutts said. “As each team identifies some new way they can perhaps improve, then every other team has to do it. It’s very competitive and yet it makes it very exciting.”

It’s not even about the old days, marked in black-and-white photos of players smoking cigarettes on the sheet. Even in the last six years alone, Carruthers has watched the demands of the game grow.

“When I first started skipping in men’s… we took it seriously,” Carruthers said. “But now it’s gone to the absolute next level. It’s pretty exciting what curling has done, but it also means you have to be more accountable.”

Hence the new partnership with Carey, who won the 1992 Brier playing third for Vic Peters, and coached his daughter, Chelsea Carey, to a 2013 Manitoba championship and national bronze medal. With Chelsea now skipping out of Alberta, the elder Carey found himself a free agent. By late September, he was interested in trying his hand at coaching a men’s rink; the Carruthers foursome was looking to bring on some veteran guidance.

“It was kind of a natural fit,” Carruthers said. “I’ve watched how he coached Chelsea’s team from a distance, and I admire the no-nonsense, harsh-but-fair leadership style that he takes. For having a young team, like what we have, it’s someone who’s going to keep us on track and that’s what we need.”

There’s a lot of curling to be played between now and February, when Carruthers and McEwen will enter the newly-branded Viterra Championship as favourites. So far, Team Carruthers is off to a good start, making the playoffs in their first three major events.

Last weekend at the Point Optical Curling Classic in Saskatoon, they fell 8-4 in the final against McEwen.

“You look at the start that our team and Mike’s team has had, it’s going to be exciting,” Carruthers said. “We play each other in the final, and we’re in Row 2 and they’re in Row 3 of the plane ride home. Most of the time it’s him playing on the Sunday in the final, but now our team is right there with him.”

In a province with two giants, it makes for good stories. Carruthers think it also makes for better curling.

“Everyone kind of feeds off each other,” Carruthers said. “It’s like that Pepsi and Coke analogy. You have that competitor that you always want to beat, and you respect them, to the next level. But they make you better, and I think that’s the case.

“In a weird way, I think it’s good for Mike to have us in the province. If he was cleaning everyone’s clock all the time, no-one’s going to teach him anything.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca