Jamie Koe and his rink were knocking on the door at this year’s Tim Hortons Brier but they won't be allowed in.
At least for the championship round.
After the opening draw of round-robin play on Wednesday, the NWT was in a position where they needed to win their last game against Yukon and hope for a tiebreaker to advance to championship pool play.
“We need to win out,” said Koe following his Tuesday loss to the wild card team from Manitoba, skipped by Mike McEwen. ”Coming in, we expected to have to win two on Wednesday.”
The Yellowknife Curling Centre squad expected an uphill battle at this years Brier as the new format split the field based on pre-event rankings. The Koe rink ranked at the bottom of the field in 16th.
“That ranking is misleading,” said curling legend Russ Howard about Koe's rink on Tuesday. “They don’t play a lot on the circuit and that’s where the rankings come from.”
Cheryl Bernard, 2010 Olympic silver medalist, agreed.
“It's not fun when the 16th-ranked team is between you and advancing and that team is a team the calibre of Jamie Koe.”
Coming into Wednesday's play, Koe had defeated Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia, which put him in position to advance to the eight-team championship round with a 4-3 record. That would have guaranteed Koe, at minimum, a tiebreaker if not straight advancement to the championship round.
“We looked at it before the event and we knew we matched up well with five of the seven teams... and we needed to win four of those,” said Koe, before the event started.
Wednesday morning, however, Koe suffered his third loss, which put him in a position of needing to win his last game and hoping B.C. would defeat Nova Scotia, forcing tie-breakers among the teams in third and fourth place.
The Yellowknifers faced off against an old rival in their must-win game, that being Yukon. Prior to 2015, the NWT champions faced off against Yukon for one spot in men's curling’s big show.
Yukon’s second, Wade Scoffin, father of skip Thomas Scoffin, lost out multiple times to Koe in his efforts to represent the North at the Canadian men’s curling championship.
This time, it was on the big stage.
“I’ve played Jamie a number of times over the years in NWT/Yukon playdowns but this time, it's at the Brier, maybe the outcome will be different,”said Wade Scoffin.
It all went according to script in that game as Koe defeated Yukon by a score of 8-2 and then it was the waiting game to see if B.C. would beat Nova Scotia.
It didn't happen as Nova Scotia prevailed, 7-6, meaning Koe missed the championship round by one game.
Jamie Murphy, Nova Scotia's skip, said he was happy to not have to go through the tiebreaker situation.
“We would have had no rest, and rest is huge. So it’s nice to be able to get some rest and be able to play again tomorrow,” he said.
-with files from James McCarthy