It's been an exciting time so far for the team skipped by Cole Tenetuik of the Battlefords.
The team made up of Tenetuik, Travis Tokarz, Garret Springer and Aaron Verbeem are on their way to the Saskatchewan Junior Men's Provincial Championship, taking place Dec. 26-31 at the Northland Power Curling Centre.
The team qualified on the strength of a solid performance at the men's provincial qualifier round Nov. 8 to 10.
They started that on an inauspicious note, losing Friday afternoon to Russell Green 7-4, but came back to clobber Judd Douhly 10 - 1 in a game that lasted only six ends.
Tenetuik then beat Sam Wills 9-4, but lost 9-2 to Dean Jaeb, which put Tenetuik in the C event. With no more room for error, Tenetuik's team won three in a row beating Justin Anderson 8-5, Carson Ackerman 8-4, and coming up against Dean Jaeb again in the C final.
The Jaeb team was one of the higher ranked teams in the province, Tenetuik said, but his team came through and won that showdown 7-4.
As one of the top four teams in that competition, they had clinched their berth in Junior Men's Provincials in North Battleford.
"We had a good run in the end," Tenetuik said of the effort of his team at the qualifiers.
This is the second year in a row that Tenetuik has made it to provincials. Last year his team finished runner-up to the Brady Scharbach rink.
However, this year he made it with a brand-new rink, which, according to Tenetuik, only started curling together about a month and a half ago. Both Tokarz and Verbeem are from Weyburn and Springer is from Foam Lake.
That has made this particular good run special. Tenetuik said expectations of his rink weren't that high going into qualifiers.
"I wasn't expecting making it out of the first Q spiel," said Tenetuik. "We were expecting to go win a few games, get our practice, get our experience up and all that, but we ended up playing really well."
He says the game plan for his team at provincials is to "keep ourselves in every game, don't let it become a blow out, just be there, make our shots, do our game plan and if we stick to that we can keep any game close and give ourselves a chance to win it."
The winner of the junior provincials curling title will represent Saskatchewan at nationals in Liverpool, N.S.
