Canadian men’s curling championship will undergo a major change starting next year.
The winner of the 2014 Tim Hortons Brier in Kamloops will get an automatic berth in the following year’s Canadian championship as Team Canada.
The returning champion wearing the Maple Leaf has been part of the Canadian women’s championship (Scotties Tournament of Hearts) since 1985, but never in the Brier.
Ontario skip Glenn Howard, left, and Alberta skip Kevin Martin have differing views on the changes to the Brier that will be incorporated next year. For 2014, the winner will get an automatic berth in the following year as Team Canada.
Photograph by: Jonathan Hayward, The Canadian Press , The Canadian Press
“I definitely think Team Canada is something that should have happened a very long time ago,” four-time Brier champion Kevin Martin of Edmonton says. “I think it’s really smart for marketing and to have one more really, really good team in the event. That makes perfect sense to me.”
The 2014 Brier winner won’t play in its 2015 provincial championship. That team’s province will send a provincial winner and thus have double representation that year, albeit one of them in Canada colours. Ontario skip Glenn Howard, a veteran of 15 Briers, is against the move. The 50-year-old feels that cheapens the purple heart crest that each provincial men’s champion earns and wears on their team jackets with pride.
“I’m old school,” Howard says. “I really don’t like the idea of a Team Canada. It really goes back to history and the purple heart. It’s the most coveted curling crest to win in our minds growing up. I think you have to win the province to earn it. You just don’t have it handed to you.”
The Canadian Curling Association voted at its annual general meeting in June 2012, on measures that will have the national men’s and women’s championships mirror each other and which will also allow equal access to both national championships for all 14 provincial and territorial associations starting in 2015.
A Territories representative in the Brier and Scotties field is currently determined by a tournament involving Yukon and Northwest Territories. A true national championship requires extending equal opportunity to both territories as well as Nunavut, says Stremlaw.
“Right now we have a system our association feels is not equitable,” he says.
“We don’t want to be known as a national sport organization that does not provide equitable opportunity for all associations.”
What that means is the province or territory that finishes last in the 2014 Brier will drop into a qualifying tournament against the two new teams, with the winner earning a spot in the main 12-team field in 2015.