The Ottawa Valley and East Ottawa curling area/zone will be represented by teams from "up the valley" as teams from Deep River and Renfrew won berths at the Holiday Inn Men's Challenge Provincial Competition to be held in Trenton Ontario from January 21 to 23. The zone playdowns were held in Arnprior on January 7 to 9 and the Paul Villard from Renfrew team took the easy route with four straight wins to capture the "A side" of 12 team double knockout competition.
Not so easy for the Deep River entry skipped by Leo Buckley. His team, consisting of lead Bill Baker, second Martin Chisholm and third Chris Knight lost their first game on Friday night to a team from Richmond by a 7-4 margin. This put their backs to the wall - however on Saturday the squad rattled off two wins against teams from the Carleton Place and CityView Curling Clubs. This meant that they had to come back on Sunday and needed to win three more games. The task started against the Vituski team from Renfrew where the Buckley team curled up a storm and set them up against the semi-finalist, Mel Scharf team from Richmond. The Buckley led team relied on the strong shot making of all four players and the efforts of (undoubtedly) the top sweeping combo (Chisholm and Baker) at the playdowns, to blow the Scharf team away in 6 ends
This set them up for the final game and a shot at a trip Trenton against the other Richmond team they had lost to in the first game on Friday night. This time the Buckley team got the jump on their opposition and carried a two rock lead and last rock advantage into the eight end. Richmond's Rocky Craig took full advantage of the free guard zone rule to set guards in front and then effectively pulled around them to put full pressure on the Deep River foursome. A tick here, a nose hit there and before you knew it the Buckley team faced 3 Richmond counters when Leo came up to thow his last rock. Needing a double or hit and stick to win, Buckley fired a peel weight hit that needed sweeping the whole way to drive one Richmond counter off and then rolled to the 12 foot and jammed against his own stone for second shot and a thrilling 6 - 5 victory.
Thus the 5 game winning streak for the team ended a long standing drought for Deep River teams trying to reach a provincial final. The team is now off to the Provincials which are held in the Trenton and Brighton curling clubs and consists of 32 men's teams from across the province.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
