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NowMedia sat down with Dave Harper before the Kelowna team set off to the Tim Hortons Brier, and now he and the team have come out of it with an experience they won’t soon forget.
Harper (lead) and Jeff Richard (third) competed at the Canadian curling competition with their wives expecting babies any day, and it made for a complicated week for the team.
Operating on a family first plan, the fathers to be ended up having to leave their team. Harper had to leave after just four ends of his first game at the Brandt Centre on the opening Saturday.
That ended up being a false alarm and Harper attempted to return for Monday games only to deal with a winter storm that forced him into Saskatoon instead of Regina. He made it to the Tuesday game where B.C. defeated Newfoundland and Labrador 12-6, but Harper was then called right back home.
“I’ve had an interesting couple of weeks,” Harper said after the win. “I’ve flown around Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary and home, but we’re here and it was nice to get a win.”
Then, once the team just missed out on a tiebreaker, losing 8-6 to Nova Scotia in the final round-robin draw in which Geall’s final shot came up just light, Richard headed back to Kelowna for the delivery of his first child.
That left the team to play with three people in the seeding draw game on Friday, in which B.C. was defeated 12-5 by New Brunswick, including a painful seven-ender in the sixth, leaving B.C. 12th out of 16 teams.
“It was fun. We knew it was going to happen at some point, you just play with what you’ve got. We’re at the Brier, so we’re not playing against club teams. You go out there and take your chances, and sometimes you get licked,” Geall said.
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