Vernon’s Jim Cotter rink will be among the 28 teams venturing to the Maritimes in November to pursue their Olympic gold-medal ambitions.
The 2017 Home Hardware Road to the Roar Pre-Trials, set for Nov. 6-12 in Summerside, P.E.I., will determine the final entries for the Tim Hortons Roar of the Rings Canadian Curling Trials, Dec. 2-10 in Ottawa, where Canada’s men’s and women’s four-player teams for the 2018 Winter Olympics will be decided.
Cotter and teammates John Morris, Tyrel Griffith and Rick Sawatsky lost the 2013 Roar of the Rings final to eventual Olympic gold medalist Brad Jacobs of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.
The Vernon quartet in P.E.I. will also include fifth teammate Catlin Schneider.
Fourteen teams in each gender will compete for two coveted berths in the Tim Hortons Roar of the Rings.
The Pre-Trials teams will be seeded one through 14 based on their 2016-17 CTRS rankings, and then split into two pools of seven for the round-robin competition.
The top three teams from each pool will advance to the playoffs, with the first- and second-place teams crossing over to meet each other in the first round of the A-side. The winners will then meet for the first Tim Hortons Roar of the Rings berth.
The first-round losers, meanwhile, will drop to meet the third-place teams in each pool in the first round of the B-side. The winners of the two games will then meet, with the winner taking on the A-side final loser for the second Tim Hortons Roar of the Rings berth.
