The Memorial Sea-Hawks, skipped by Greg Blyde, play for a gold medal this afternoon in the men’s final of the U Sports Canadian university curling championships in Fredericton, N.B.
The Blyde rink, which also includes Daniel Bruce (who throws fourth stones), Ryan McNeil Lamswood and Nathan King, will play the Carleton Ravens of Ottawa for the crown.
Memorial downed the Dalhousie Tigers 10-3 in semifinal play Monday night.
The Tigers had finished first preliminary round of the event with a 6-1 record that included a 7-2 victory over the Sea-Hawks in the teams’ final round-robin contest Monday morning. But in the rematch later in the day, Memorial came up with what Blyde described as probably the team’s best performance of the season, stealing five points in all, including one in each of the first two ends, en route to victory.
Memorial had gone 4-3 in the preliminary round to earn the fourth and final berth in the playoffs, One of their wins came over Carleton.
Blyde is from St. John’s, but the other three members of the Sea-Hawks team — Daniel Bruce, Ryan McNeil Lamswood and Nathan King — are from the west coast of the province. In fact, it was a Bruce-skipped rink that defeated a Blyde entry in final of the 2018 Newfoundland and Labrador junior men’s championship. But when Bruce, McNeil Lamswood and King came to St. John’s for school, they hooked up with Blyde in what has been a pretty successful venture.
The rink won the 2019 provincial junior championship and advanced to the second stage of the national juniors, finishing with a 5-5 record.
They finished third behind Dalhousie and the University of New Brunswick at the AUS championship in St. John’s last month, but with UNB already in the U Sports championship as host team and the Atlantic conference getting two other berths for the nationals, the Sea-Hawks earned a place in the Fredericton event.
If Blyde and Co. win today, it will be the third national university men’s curling title for Memorial, which saw Colin Thomas’s rink take the crown in 2011 and Adam Boland’s rink do the same in 2017.
