Kevin Koe is going to have to do it the hard way if he is going to successfully defend his 2012 Alberta men’s curling title.
Koe, the top-seeded team at the Boston Pizza Cup, lost the treasured A Event final to Kevin Martin on Thursday night, then giant-killer Aaron Sluchinski of Airdrie pulled off a 10-7 upset in the B Event semifinals Friday afternoon at Sobeys Arena in the Leduc Recreation Centre.
Sluchinski later downed Charley Thomas of Calgary 7-5 in an extra end to win the B Event final and advance to Saturday’s Page Playoff 1-2 game against 11-time provincial champ Kevin Martin at 6:30 p.m.
“(Calgary’s Matthew) Blandford lost 14-0 to these guys (on Wednesday),” said Sluchinski, who said the Koe game was his first time playing a World Curling Tour powerhouse team. “I said, ‘Just don’t do that.’ We ended up having a pretty good game.”
Koe lead Nolan Thiessen said: “People will probably look at it and say, ‘Sluchinski beat Koe,’ but everybody plays better at provincials, right. If we play bad and we have an off-game, we’re going to get smoked.
“We’ve had some bad games. A couple of years ago at Wainwright, we didn’t make the playoffs. It was a similar situation. We were just lost out there,” he continued. “We’ve just got to fix it in the next hour and a half and hopefully make some history.”
A Koe mistake in the first end left Sluchinski what he thought was a double takeout for two or three. When the smoke cleared, he had four. Two ends later, the former Alberta junior men’s champion out of Drayton Valley was up 6-1 before Koe clawed his way back into the game, tying the score 6-6 after six ends.
The teams traded single points in the next two ends, before Sluchinski played a bump in the four-foot for three more and ran Koe, who was running out of time over the last few ends, out of rocks in the 10th.
“We just played bad,” Thiessen said. “They just outplayed us. We missed shots. We were throwing draws through (the house). I don’t know. We just weren’t good.”
Koe said on Thursday that this has been his team’s best season every heading into the provincial championship.
“We’re leading the CRTS, leading the money list, leading everything there is to win, we won three big events, so it’s been our best start for sure,” he said. “If we can get to the Brier in our home province, that would just be amazing.
“You can’t get too far ahead of yourself,” he added, “just because of who you’re playing in Alberta. It’s just so tough to win.”
Truer words were never spoken.
Koe will play Jamie King’s St. Albert rink that includes former world champions Blake MacDonald and Scott Pfeifer in a C Event final at 1 p.m. Saturday. The winner advances to the Page 3-4 game at 6:30 p.m. against the winner of the Thomas-Brent Bawel C semifinal, also at 1 p.m.
