Laycock rink shuffles roles at trials
With the Olympic trials drawing close and lots still to figure out, Steve Laycock hit on a novel idea: Shuffle the roster.
The skip, whose Saskatoonbased team will play at the Canadian Olympic curling trials starting Saturday, talked it over with his team a few weeks ago. The only guy staying put is lead Dallan Muyres.
Laycock will throw third rocks, but still call the game. Second Matt Dunstone, a two-time junior champion at skip, will throw fourth rocks, and third Kirk Muyres moves to second.
“From an ego standpoint, and after skipping and throwing those last ones, I know just how important those setup shots can be,” Laycock said this week after landing in Ottawa, where the trials will be held. “It’s not like I’m seeing this as a demotion, and hopefully we’re not putting pressure on Matt that he can’t handle. He’s excelled in these roles before, obviously, winning the championships he did in junior. So we’ll be set up pretty well.”
Laycock said the team felt its way forward this season after second Colton Flasch split with the squad at the end of February. They added Dunstone, and sit 25th on the World Curling Tour’s 2017-18 money list with $13,600 through six bonspiels.
It hasn’t been a great season, Laycock concedes — they played a lighter schedule while gearing specifically for the trials, and weren’t chasing hard results like in past years — but he hopes the latest move does the trick. They tried the new formulation at a WCT event in Penticton in early November, going 3-2 in the round robin and splitting two tiebreakers.
“We’ve been trying to re-figure what the new DNA of this team is,” he said. “When you change one person on a four-person team, it’s a new team — it isn’t like you’re just plug and replace. We’ve experimented with what’s going to work for us, and hopefully we’ve got that figured out.
“We thought about our comfort level for certain game plans, setting up ends a little differently, and we looked at who’s going to be the best to do some of these things. I would say I’m probably best suited to be the one throwing those shots to set up the guy throwing last. It’s a decision I suggested to the team, and when I explained the logic, they all said it makes a ton of sense.”
Nine men’s teams are at the trials, with one Canadian Olympic berth available. Nine women’s teams are also competing; none based out of Saskatchewan.
Laycock, playing at his second trials, readily concedes his team is an underdog. But he said he’s seen teams put together great three- or four-year cycles, arrive at the trials with big expectations and fall apart during the week.
“We certainly don’t have expectations heaped on us by anyone,” Laycock said. “I think we can just go out and play, and at the same time, have the comfort of knowing we’ve beat every single team in the field before — and most of them, quite frequently. There’s no reason we can’t win.”
He laughed when asked to assess his team’s chances against a tough field.
“How are anyone’s chances?” he said. “I think even the favourite probably has a 20 or 30 per cent chance of winning it. It’s going to be an absolute battle. All these teams have beaten each other numerous times over the last few seasons, and there’s no reason we can’t win. There’s no reason any of these teams can’t win.”