Fresh off national title, Dunstone takes aim at curling worlds

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This article was published 01/02/2016 (3836 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the three years since Matt Dunstone and his team last returned home from a Canadian Junior Curling Championship, only a few things about the moment changed.

The front end looks different, but the man on top was the same. So was the cheering airport welcome, the bagpiped heroes’ march — and the glint of gold.

Oh, and the thrill of bringing the Canadian junior men’s championship back home — well, that part too hadn’t changed.

“It feels like the last time,” said Dunstone third Colton Lott, after landing in Winnipeg Monday afternoon. “Before, it was a dream come true, and even now I think it’s a dream come true.”

Yet plenty has changed since 2013, when Dunstone and Lott won their first Canadian title. (In the intervening two years, that honour was claimed by Manitoban rival Braden Calvert.) They’re now teamed up with lead Robbie Gordon and second Kyle Doering, for one. For another? They’ve been playing scary good.

Consider the starring shot of Sunday’s gold-medal match against Northern Ontario’s Tanner Horgan. Dunstone’s first shot in the second end was a classic, a laser beam runback through a narrow port. The hit made waves, with Reid Carruthers and Brad Jacobs third Ryan Fry among those tweeting praise.

Monday, Lott still laughed just to think of it; lead Gordon just grinned.

“That’s just Matt,” Gordon said. “You kind of expect it from him. Those shots he makes time and time again, so it’s not out of the ordinary for us to see. It looks pretty great on TV, but we’re all used to him making stuff like that.”

At that point, Dunstone recalled, the team was already rolling hot.

“There was no shot we felt like we couldn’t make at the time,” he said. “I wasn’t really ever worried playing that shot. It’s not my bread and butter, because I don’t make those all the time, but I do like playing those shots.”

After Horgan’s ensuing miss in that second end, Dunstone delivered an equally skilled hammer, a picturesque draw that nestled up to the four-foot and scored three for a 3-2 lead. That one-two punch set the tone for the rest of the game, one in which Dunstone’s foursome shot at a blistering rate and won 11-4.

No, really, their shot percentages were outstanding. Doering was perfect at 100 per cent; Gordon and Dunstone finished at 97, a staggering number for a skip.

Maybe facts like that whisper another difference between Team Matt Dunstone this year, and three years ago. In his last year of junior and with more men’s experience, Dunstone himself is more level on the sheet, and a lot more seasoned. And he wasn’t planning on walking away from Stratford, Ont., without gold.

“Matt just seemed determined to win,” Gordon said. “He’s the only one from our team who ages out this year, so he kinda said, this wasn’t going to be his last junior game. He wanted to go out there and shoot the lights out all week, and he did… he was making everything, it seemed like.”

Now, they’ll look to do it again. Dunstone’s team is set to compete in the Manitoba men’s provincial Viterra Championship in Selkirk next week and could do some damage — they beat Mike McEwen twice this season at the Dekalb Superspiel — but as a young team, they’ll be happy just to see how far they can go.

Their more critical mission will come in March, when they head to the world junior championships in Denmark. In 2013, Dunstone walked away with a bronze medal. Now, he’s on the hunt to close out his junior career with a second consecutive gold medal for Canada, following Calvert’s victory at worlds last season.

“We worked so hard for this,” Dunstone said. “To finally have step two of three come true, it’s just another step in the process. We’re almost where we want to be, so we’ve just got to keep working hard.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca