Team Manitoba will be the hometown favourites when the Brier officially gets underway at Westoba Place in Brandon on Saturday.
It’s been eight long years since Jeff Stoughton won Manitoba’s last Brier title, but Reid Carruthers and Mike McEwen have designs on ending the provincial drought.
It’ll be Carruthers seventh career Brier appearance, and the fourth straight for McEwen, but this one will be a little different with the hometown crowd behind them.
“It doesn’t get old,” Carruthers said. “It kinda feels like the first one all over again.”
“It’s extra motivation that it’s kinda right in my backyard,” McEwen said.
McEwen grew up in Brandon and their second Derek Samagalski now lives in the Wheat City.
“As a kid, you always dream about playing in provincials, then ever winning provincials and going to the Brier,” Samagalski said.
“I’ve played in a couple Briers but never fortunate enough to play in a hometown Brier. But this being in Brandon, and me living in Brandon now, I’m very looking forward to it, and gonna have a lot of family and friends there.”
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The season has been a bit of a rocky road for this new team as Carruthers and McEwen have gone back and forth calling the games and throwing the skip stones. But after getting on a roll at provincials, they believe they’ve now found the winning formula with McEwen the skip and Carruthers playing third.
“All four of us were out there trying to do too much,” Samagalski said.
“In professional sports everybody has a role to do. And unfortunately sometimes we weren’t following our proper role and we were trying too hard sometimes.”
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“I’m normally the skip, so its been one of those transition roles for me,” Carruthers said. “Where as now I’m almost like the assistant out there, so I’m trying to let Mike lead the show, and I guess if I see something we should be doing I’ll comment.”
“We’re playing at our best that we’ve seen in the first four or five months of our team,” McEwen said. “We’re definitely in a much better place than we have been.”
They’re hoping their success continues in a building that was the site of Carruthers’ 2015 provincial title. Their first game is against Saskatchewan Kirk Muyres on Saturday afternoon.
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