If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, you’d know that Manitoba is sending both our men’s and women’s junior curling teams to the World Championship in Krasnoyarsk, Russia this February. Both teams played strong at the National Junior Championship in Langley, BC, coming out on top and receiving a hero’s welcome at the James Richardson International Airport when they landed in Winnipeg earlier this week.
We are proud to showcase Providence’s own, Jordan Peters, the vice skip on our Canadian Men’s Juniors National Team who’s going to compete in Russia. Peters has been attending Providence since 2016 and is completing his degree in Business Administration.
When asked how he got started in curling, Peters responded by saying it was his dad that got him into the sport. “My dad was a competitive curler when he was younger. When he had me, that competitiveness rubbed off. I was always in the curling club watching him. After a game, I’d want to go out on the ice and see what it was like.”
Starting to curl at the age of four, Peters’ earliest memories are of playing with his dad and joining in fun spiels at their local club. Between the ages of 10 to 12, he started into league play and became more serious about his sport. When explaining that he loves the strategy and friendships best about curling, Peters confided, “Many people don’t realize that curling is a very strategic game kind of like chess. So there’s a lot of thinking that needs to be done especially on the skip’s end, but there’s also a lot of communication (and friendship building) with your team.”
At Nationals in Langley, Peters’ team came out of the gate strong and made a few good shots early on. The opposing team made a couple of misses. So Peters (and team) were able to make three steals in the third and fourth, setting the pace for the rest of their game. “We just needed to hold our lead. Our skip made a few dandies– a couple of points here and there. And the other team just couldn’t preform,” said Peters. “We wanted this bad. We were hungry for it (the win).”
The team, consisting of Jacques Gauthier (skip), Brayden Payette (second), Zack Bilawka (lead) and Jordan Peters (vice skip), won their final game in Langley against Newfoundland/Labrador with a score of 8-6. And that is what propelled them to Worlds.
Coming into the week, Peters humbly admitted that he didn’t know what to expect. There are a lot of strong Canadian teams at Nationals. He thought his team would do well and (maybe) make the championship pool. But it ended up that our Manitoba team played strong and consistently throughout the competition, leading to their win on Sunday.
When asked about winning Nationals, Peters said, “I’ve never experienced that before. So it was a cool feeling. The support from everybody back home kind of overwhelmed us. A lot of my friends from Providence texted me, saying, ‘Good luck. Congrats.’ And that was very meaningful to me.”
Jordan leaves for Worlds on February 10th for two weeks. And he can be sure that our whole Providence community will be cheering for him.
