Lucas Punkari
Last year, Isaac Keffer watched on as his sister, Tirzah, led the Muskie girls’ curling rink to a quarter-final berth at the OFSAA championship in Toronto.
Now it’s his turn to lead a Muskie squad to the all-Ontario’s as he’ll skip the Muskie boys’ foursome at this year’s provincial showdown in Thunder Bay starting next Wednesday.
While this may be his first OFSAA appearance, Keffer already has set one goal for himself.
“I’m going to try and beat [Tirzah’s] finish, that’s for sure,” he laughed.
“It’s going to be a tough tournament, though, especially with a lot of good teams coming from southern Ontario,” he warned.
Keffer, along with third Cody Heyens, second Ian Grant, lead Jordan Sokoliuk, and fifth Luke Esselink, nabbed a provincial berth after capturing the NWOSSAA crown last week in Terrace Bay with a 5-1 record.
“This is the last year for us here so we went in wanting to win it all,” Keffer noted.
“The guys worked together really well and we gave it all that we had out on the ice, and in the end it turned out really good,” he added.
The foursome entered their final round-robin game at NWOSSAA needing to beat Westgate (Thunder Bay) to punch their ticket to the all-Ontarios. A loss, on the other hand, would have put them into a three-team tie-breaker situation.
When all was said and done, however, the black-and-gold accomplished their goal of making it to OFSAA by routing Westgate 8-1.
“We just went into that game knowing that we had to curl our best game of the entire week,” Heyens explained.
“They [Westgate] weren’t the greatest team, but we couldn’t lose focus out there otherwise we would run into trouble,” he stressed.
“We just made every shot . . . played the game end by end, and we got the win as a result,”
The provincial showdown also marks a return visit to the Port Arthur and Fort William Curling Clubs for the Muskie rink as they’ve curled there in the past for both Bantam and Junior
competitions.
“Those are probably my two favourite rinks to play on,” Keffer remarked.
“They’re both really nice clubs, and the ice there is fast and curls a lot, which is also quite nice,” he added.
The black-and-gold, slotted into Pool ‘A,’ will begin their quest for OFSAA gold next Wednesday at 12:30 p.m. (EDT) when they take on Ridgetown at the Fort William Curling Club.
Then on Thursday, the Muskies will take to the ice twice at the Port Arthur Curling Club—first facing Sir Winston Churchill (St. Catharines) in the morning draw before squaring off with London Central in the afternoon.
Fort High then will wrap up round-robin play next Friday morning back at the Fort William Curling Club against Malvern Collegiate Institute (Toronto).
The top two teams from Pool ‘A’ then will move on to the quarter-finals later that afternoon at the Port Arthur Curling Club.
“We’re just going to try and go in there playing the same game that we did at NWOSSAA,” said Keffer, who has described his team in the past as being very aggressive.
“We’re going to be using that aggressive style of play that we bring right from the start and let our opponents play right into that, instead of trying to spend the rest of the game trying to play catch up,” he reasoned.
