Manitoba skip throws shot of the Games

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This article was published 16/03/2011 (5629 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was a shot LeBron James couldn’t match, and it was  made on live national television.

Kyle Doering, the 15-year-old skip of Manitoba’s men’s curling team at the Canada Winter Games, was the toast of Halifax when he made a triple-raise takeout to score a six-ender against Ontario with the TSN cameras rolling in the round robin portion of the tournament.

The East St. Paul resident — and his team of third Colton Lott of Sandy Hook, second Derek Oryniak of North Kildonan and lead Lucas Van Den Bosch of Fort Garry — went on to win the bronze medal, but it was that shot that will stick in his mind forever.

“The team really helped out on that shot with the line call and the sweeping,” said the skip from the West Kildonan Curling Club. “I was getting texts off the hook, and loads of email too.”

As excited as the four Manitobans were at the time, they were even more pumped up when they turned on SportsCentre later that evening. The shot was shown as part of the nightly sportscast’s “honour roll” of the top plays of the day, alongside an acrobatic move on the basketball court by James.

When the time came to show the “highlight of the night”, the curlers erupted in their room when Doering’s shot got the nod.

“It was 12 at night, and we had to get up at 6:30 the next morning, but we wanted to see if they showed it,” Doering said. “We were going absolutely crazy when they showed us. The fact that I watch that every day… it was kind of cool to have those guys mention my name.”

Before long the shot found a home on YouTube. Doering can’t quite compete with Maria Aragon, but the clip has garnered more than 6,000 views.

As for the competition, Doering and his rink received an early wake-up call when they lost their first game to the Yukon.

“We weren’t comfortable at all in that game,” he said. “It was our first time ever playing with fans on the ice surface, and playing under TSN lights was also different.”

The team quickly regrouped, and played well until losing to Saskatchewan in the semifinal. With the gold medal out of reach, Doering said the team had to dig deep to motivate itself for the bronze-medal game against New Brunswick.

“It was very hard to get up for (the bronze-medal game),” he said. “But we knew they’d be down too.”

Once the players got into the flow of the game, with plenty of other Team Manitoba athletes from other sports cheering them on, they realized that a medal for their province was at stake.

“When we won, we were so happy,” Doering said. “It was cool that we boosted Manitoba, and we beat Saskatchewan in the end by two medals in the overall standings. It felt like we contributed to the team.”

avi.saper@canstarnews.com