After opening with a pair of wins at the junior men’s Northwestern playdowns in Sioux Lookout last week, Chris Matheson’s Fort Frances rink looked to be in good shape.
But that’s when the road to the provincials took a big detour.
Matheson’s crew proceeded to lose their last four games–three by a sizable margin–to dash hopes of trying to make a second-straight appearance at the provincial showdown.
Last year’s rink was skipped by Bill Crewson, with Matheson as third, but it wasn’t a case of a new skip having troubling adjusting.
After winning those first two games, his foursome, which included Tyler Bell, Matt Gushulak, Joel Perron, and Steve Gushulak, simply didn’t curl very well.
In short, they missed too many shots at key times in each game.
“We just weren’t curling well and every time we made a mistake it cost us,” said Matheson, who also curls with the Muskie high school team. “We had lots of misses from everyone.”
After dropping Jarrett Landry (Balmertown) 7-5 and Dustin Leclerc (Longlac) 10-7 last Thursday, Matheson lost 11-4 to Dustin Kroefer (Dryden) and then was doubled 8-4 by Andrew Mikkelson (Port Arthur).
But the key loss, said Matheson, was their 7-3 defeat to Joe Scharf (Fort William) on Friday evening that killed any chance of the Fort rink advancing to the provincials.
They then dropped a slim 6-5 decision to Aaron Affleck (Kenora) in their final round-robin game Saturday morning.
Mikkelson (6-0) and Scharf (4-2) advanced to the provincials, which will be held Jan. 14-16 in Iroquois Falls.
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