Lucas Punkari
After getting her first taste of competing at the all-Ontarios last year, the goal for Tirzah Keffer and the rest of her Muskie girls’ rink this season has been simple.
Get back there again.
Keffer, along with third Samantha Mueller, second Taylor Hartlin, and lead Carley Busch, are set to continue their march towards this year’s OFSSA tournament in Thunder Bay when they take part in the NorWOSSA playoffs in Sioux Lookout starting Monday (Feb. 28).
“Getting a chance to go to OFSSA last year was really good, but we weren’t as ready as we thought we were for it because we didn’t really expect to go,” admitted Keffer, who led her crew to a quarter-final berth a year ago in Toronto.
“We’ve been working really hard this year by doing dryland training in the summer to get our bodies ready for the season, and we’ve been practising a lot and taking part in bonspiels to get as much ice time as we can,” Keffer added.
In fact, the Muskie rink captured the annual Fort Frances ladies’ bonspiel this past weekend.
Keffer will be joined at the NorWOSSA playoffs by the Muskie boys’ team, skipped by her younger brother, Isaac, and the Muskie mixed foursome, led by Luke Esselink and also including Karleigh Wright at third, Ben Tysz at second, and Megan Paterson at lead.
This marks the first time in a number of years that Fort High had enough curlers to field a mixed team.
“Normally we don’t have a huge interest in curling to have a mixed team, but this year we were able to drum up enough people to have one,” explained coach Pegeen Keffer.
“They’ve grown tremendously as players throughout the year, and the hope now is that our younger players [Wright, Tysz, and Paterson] will continue to play with the boys’ and girls’ teams once the older players graduate,” she added.
This year also marks the first time Esselink, a Grade 12 student, has played the skip position. But he said the transition has gone rather smoothly.
“It’s been a really good experience, and we’re all working really well together,” Esselink enthused.
The boys’ foursome, which features Cody Heyens at third, Ian Grant at second, and Jordan Sokoliuk at lead, has been together for a number of years—something Isaac Keffer feels will be beneficial come playoff time.
“Our lineup has been the same for a while now, so it’s been good to have that chemistry,” he reasoned.
“We’re just trying to work on some little things to fix up before we head off, mainly on our take-outs, just to make sure that they are perfect,” he added.
That same experience factor is something the Muskie girls’ rink hopes to key on as their foursome from last year’s OFSSA run returned intact for this season.
“We have a really great chemistry together,” Tirzah Keffer said.
“We know each other really well, we all play really well together, and we’re open with each other out there,” she noted.
That sentiment is echoed by girls’ coach Dave Bondett, who has coached both Keffer and Mueller for the last five years.
“They have progressed into a very strong hitting team, and they need to keep doing that to be successful,” Bondett said.
“They have the incentive this year since they saw what they were playing against at OFSSA, and I’ve seen a big difference in their play this season as a result,” he added.
