Olympic skip Koe loses another teammate

NORTH BAY — Another member of Team Kevin Koe is leaving the rink after missing the podium at last month’s Winter Olympics.

After a four-year run with the Calgary team, second Brent Laing is departing to join a newlook Team John Epping next season.

The announcement came two weeks after Koe third Marc Kennedy said he’d be taking a break from competitive curling. Koe and lead Ben Hebert have yet to announce their plans for the 2018-19 campaign. “We talked about staying together and we looked at different options and it became pretty clear that just for whatever reason — circumstance, choices, what everybody was looking for — it’s just the three of us weren’t going to end up together,” Laing told The Canadian Press on Monday.

Epping announced earlier in the day that his team would be making changes. Second Patrick Janssen and lead Tim March will be leaving while Mat Camm remains at third. Laing, who arrived in North Bay on Monday to watch wife Jennifer Jones play at the world women’s curling championship, will reunite with lead Craig Savill on the new team. They won national and world titles together with skip Glenn Howard in 2007 and 2012.

Epping, who won the Canadian Open in 2015, recently won bronze at the Tim Hortons Brier. The 34-year-old skip is currently ranked eighth in the world. “I know I’ve been around awhile but there’s still lots of things on my bucket list that I need to check off,” Epping said from Toronto. “I think that the best move for me is to bring them on to help do that.”

A message left with Koe was not immediately returned. Several teams are rejigging their lineups as they look to the next quadrennial.