Whitehorse’s Team Wallingham has been sweeping up wins on the Alberta Junior Curling Tour.
The junior men’s curling team has gone 8-3 over two bonspiels in the last three weeks, downing some top teams along the way.
“Our team is curling well and it’s good to get a couple spiels under our belt in the first month of the season,” said skip Joe Wallingham. “It’s good to have a good start.”
This past weekend the rink, which includes third Brayden Klassen, second Trygg Jensen and lead Spencer Wallace, competed at the Leduc Lions Junior Men’s Bonspiel.
The Wallingham rink opened with three straight wins to qualify for the quarterfinal where they lost 8-4 to Medicine Hat’s Team Koch.
In their second game of the round robin Wallingham beat the team of Whitehorse native Thomas Scoffin 8-2. Scoffin was curling with his University of Alberta Junior Golden Bears team that is currently ranked fourth on the Alberta tour.
“We managed to beat him - that was a good game,” said Wallingham. “It was a fun game to play, that’s for sure, and it was the first time I’ve ever beat him.”
“It was closer than the score looked ... It was back and forth in the first couple of ends and Thomas was curling well. But my team, we all curled well.”
Team Wallingham also downed Alberta’s sixth ranked team 7-4 in the round robin in Leduc.
The Whitehorse rink began the new season with a division win at the Red Deer Junior Classic.
With Will Klassen subbing in for his brother Spencer, Team Wallingham went 3-2 in the round robin. They then went 7-4 over 10th-ranked Team Helston and won the final 11-2 over Team Parent in the Division 3 playoff.
“Spencer is our regular guy, he was just working in the bush outfitting and didn’t get back in time for the Red Deer spiel, so we took Brayden’s brother,” said Wallingham.
Team Wallingham plans to curl in a local spiel or two in Whitehorse before entering the Yukon junior championships with hopes of earning a spot at the junior nationals taking place at the end of January in Corner Brook, N.L.
“That’s the main goal for the season,” said Wallingham.
The rink placed ninth at the 2014 Canadian Junior Curling Championships last January.
The team, who at the time included Jensen and Will and Brayden Klassen, then won gold in junior men’s curling at the Arctic Winter Games in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Wallingham has aged out of eligibility for the 2015 Canada Winter Games in Prince George, B.C., but a team of Jensen, the Klassens and Bailey Muir-Cressman plan to represent Yukon at the quadrennial Games.
Contact Tom Patrick at
tomp@yukon-news.com