When Slam Curling Comes to Your (Nearby) Town

WATERLOO, ON – The first Grand Slam of Curling event is now underway and in preparation, various teams were looking to get into early season form this past weekend.

I had a rinkside seat.

With the AMJ Masters being played in London, Ont., many teams – particularly international squads – were looking to get some curling action in before the big event. As luck would have it, an early season tour event was happening an hour up the road in Waterloo at the KW Granite Club – the Hogged Rock KW Fall Classic.

This happened at my home club, and I was very excited to see some top names pop in for this event. As it is one of the few early season events in the area, the Classic usually draws a fair number of entries from international teams, but this year both the men’s and women’s draws had five Top 20 foursomes enter the event, many of them scheduled to compete at the Tier 1 level at the Masters.

Our humble event saw teams like Sweden’s Niklas Edin, Italy’s Jöel Retornaz and Germany’s Marc Muskatewitz on the men’s side plus Sweden’s Anna Hasselborg, and Koreans Gim Eun-ji and Kim Eun-jung on the women’s side. There was good representation from local teams as well, and they weren’t pushed around: both finals showcased an international team challenging a southern Ontario opponent.

In men’s play, the champion was Italy’s Team Retornaz, who beat the young Team Jayden King foursome out of London.

Team King will be competing in Tier 2 of the Masters this week, starting Thursday morning, in the wake of their invitation to the event causing some discussion.

On the women’s side, Team Hollie Duncan out of Woodstock, Ont. came out on top in the final over Japan’s Team Momoha Tabata.

One of the quirks of an event like ours is that there were no time clocks for the teams to follow, and some took full advantage. Despite the organizer’s best efforts, slow play started to force game times to creep later and later.

I naively figured that there would be some sort of peer pressure to keep pace of play up … but that obviously was not the case.

Wherever you are located, keep an eye out for the tour schedule to see if a tournament is happening near you. Smaller events like this one offer you a chance to see some great action up close, and many of the teams stick around the club after their games – and most are very approachable people.

And while many of these events consistently operate under the radar, they’re essential to maintaining a robust curling season that keeps the top dogs in practice and offers smaller teams the opportunities to build up their rankings.