The 2020 BC Curling Championships are underway, and one of the talks of the tournament is Team Tardi, who made the jump from juniors to pros for a shot at competing at the Brier.
Though some may have had their doubts about such an early jump to pro, foregoing their shot at another junior title, the young team came out strong on Tuesday, winning their first game 10-1.
“It’s a good start to the first game,” said skip Tyler Tardi, 21. “We wanted to take it fairly slow and easy enough to not make it too difficult on ourselves, we’re just trying to figure out the ice as best we could and I think we’re doing a pretty okay job of that.”
Tyler is joined by his brother Jordan Tardi, 23 as second, Sterling Middleton, 21 third, and Alex Horvath, 22 as lead. Collectively the team represents Surrey, Victoria, Fort St. John and Burnaby.
The team has a an impressive resume coming out of their junior career. As well as all their individual accomplishments, the team is 2019 and 2019 Canadian and World Junior Men’s Curling Champions. Tardi was well aware of what they were giving up by switching to the big leagues.
“Obviously a big risk was giving up our last year of juniors, it’s a big opportunity for anyone who can compete at that event in the nationals and it was obviously tough with it being at home,” he said.
However, it wasn’t a decision made lightly, and the team considered the pros and cons of the move.
“I think a big thing was we knew a lot of teams when they make that transition do a lot of hard losses and there’s a big growth period for that and we kind of just wanted to get that over with as soon as we could. Try to get a little bit of a head start on some other people our age.”
They approached their first pro tournament with both a smart strategy and the benefit of being well rested, a fairly new revelation for the team, Tardi noted.
“We’re overall just really excited to be here,” he said. “It’s the first time we’ve actually not had back to back events — in the past we’ve had the nationals just finishing and then we just come straight here, and we’re a little tired, not going to lie, not exactly super excited to be playing in another weekend. So this is our first time we’ve kind of got to ease into it and we’re all really excited.”
Tardi came out strong with a commanding 10-1 victory against Team Thompson, defeating them after only six ends following scoring three three-point ends in a row.
Unfortunately, they came up just short in their second game on Wednesday against team Joanisse, but not for lack of trying with a final score of 8-7.