New Team - Busy Summer

We’ve had a very busy summer preparing our four year plan! So here’s what Team Koe has been up to:

Like any new team, we had a lot of things to cover during the off season. First and foremost, we needed to secure some corporate partners for our 4 year run towards the Canadian Olympic Trials in December, 2017 and ultimately to The Winter Olympics in South Korea, 2018. One of the advantages of having members from three of Canada’s top five teams over the past five years is that we all had some great corporate relationships from our previous teams, so that is where the sponsor hunt began.

Meridian Manufacturing was the first corporate partner to sign on. Meridian has been a long time supporter of Team Martin in previous years and they were very excited about the new Team Koe. In fact, they were so excited that they agreed to become our title sponsor for the next 4 years!  

The first official Team Weekend took place in Ontario early in May. We set up some meetings with potential corporate partners and of course a couple of rounds of golf to see how the new squad stacks up on the links! The meetings were a success and led to our eventual signing of Weed Man as one of our main corporate partners. This was especially great for me as Weed Man has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, with my parents owning a franchise since 1982. On the links at Eagle’s Nest and Copper Creek north of Toronto, the inaugural Team Koe golf matches took place with the pairing of Marc and Brent taking the early lead in what I am sure will be a long list of epic matches vs Ben and Kevin. This was also our first chance to start to lay out the framework of what this new team will look like and how it will operate on and off the ice. We covered everything from who would be in charge of logistics (entering spiels, booking flights, banking ) to on ice strategy, off-ice routines, pre event training week-ends, coaching options and our first WCT schedule as a team just to list a few. There really is a lot of work that goes into forming a new team and none of us have been through it to this extent in a long time. All in all, the weekend was a huge success and Team Koe was now officially underway!

Another challenge of having a few different teams coming together to form one team is the question of what type of equipment we will use? After some discussions amongst ourselves and with potential suppliers we decided that the only choice for Team Koe is BalancePlus.com and we are happy to have the BalancePlus team on our side for the next four years! 

Our next team event was a lunch and golf day with Title Sponsor, Meridian in Camrose Alberta. It’s always great to get out to these events to meet some of the people involved in these great Canadian companies. Sid and his team put on a great lunch where we were able to meet and chat with some of Meridian’s dealers and staff. After lunch, Kevin showed off his #1 summer skill, which is dominating scramble golf tourneys, by winning his first of several summer scramble golf tournaments. Team Koe’s relationship with Meridian as our title sponsor got off to a great start and we can’t thank Sid and his team enough for becoming a partner in our dream for the next four years.

We had our first team week-end with the spouses in June at the Banff Springs Hotel where we were invited to attend The Little Warriors Charity Golf Tournament. We were wined and dined by our hosts and enjoyed a great day of golf on the Banff Springs Golf course while the ladies hit the spa for some much deserved rest and relaxation. There were some pretty serious hole in one prizes on the course to be won that day, but today just wasn’t the day for an ace...more on that to follow! Being in Banff for 3 days allowed us to spend some time getting to know the real brains behind the Team Koe player’s...the spouses. All in all, it was a fantastic weekend in one of the most beautiful places in the world supporting an amazing charity. www.littlewarriors.ca

One of the main items we had to cover this summer was who to ask to be our coach. After some quick discussions amongst ourselves, we asked John Dunn, who has coached Kevin for the past number of years. After some conversations with curling athletes, his family, and his employer, John agreed to join the team for the next four years in our quest to become Team Canada at the Olympics in 2018. Our first chance to get together all five of us came in July. John hosted us at his place in Edmonton, and I’ve got to be honest, for a proud Scotsman, he sure makes a mean wood fired pizza in his backyard! We had lots of laughs with John and also hammered out some of the important details of how this team will work and what we can expect from John and what he can expect from us. After the meeting, we all left super excited that we have John on board to help us get to where we are planning on going.

Another great partner who has been a big supporter of both Team Koe and Team Martin over the last number of years is Rod Wild and his team at Wild Rows Pump & Compression Limited. Rod was eager to jump at the opportunity to continue his support of Kevin, Marc and Ben and welcomed me to the team at a great event he hosts in Lloydminster, Alberta. Rod puts on quite the spread at his place hosting friends and employees for a get together that you really have to experience to understand! He has everything from a camp fire, to the largest grill you’ve ever seen, to a late night poker tourney in his onsite hall. The next day, Wild Rows hosts their annual company golf tourney, which once again Kevin managed to win.

Kevin also has a long standing relationship with Pomeroy Inn & Suites, who also happen to be the title sponsor of the Pomeroy Inn & Suites Prairie Showdown, a World Curling Tour event that takes place in Grand Prairie Alberta in March. We are very excited to say that Pomeroy has also signed on as a partner to Team Koe and that Team Koe will be competing in the Prairie Showdown in Grand Prairie in March, 2015!

Things were certainly coming together for the new Team Koe and the summer wasn’t over yet. Ben and Kevin reached out to a few key business contacts that they have in Calgary and out of that took some meetings about adding a few more corporate partners to the team. They started at their own employers with both FOCUS CORPORATION who employ Benny, and TALISMAN ENERGY INC agreeing to become part of the team! They were also able to set up a meeting with UFA – United Farmers of Alberta, who saw a great correlation between curling’s small town rural roots and UFA’s rural focus and signed on as a major partner of Team Koe!

Trinidad Drilling Ltd was the next stop for Ben and Kevin and it just so happened that one of the Brier’s famous “Sociable’s” members is an employee of Trinidad. He was able to open the doors to a company that seems to be full of ex-CFL players who have a great understanding of Canadian sport and how important it is for Canadians to support our amateur athletes in their sports dreams. Trinidad was the final piece to the corporate partner puzzle for Team Koe and we couldn’t be happier to have them as part of the team.

August brought on a couple more corporate golf tournaments in the Calgary area at The Links of Glen Eagles and Bearspaw Country Club. I’ll start with the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA) event at Bearspaw even though it took place after the Trinidad Drilling event at Glen Eagles. UFA hosted us to some amazing weather and a great golf course and we met numerous employees and business associates of UFA. In typical Canadian rural fashion, we were welcomed with absolute open arms and all of the people we met were so excited to have us there and welcomed us with open arms.

The Trinidad Drilling company golf tournament took place at The Links Of Glen Eagles and the weather did not really cooperate that day. But that did not slow down the enthusiasm of our hosts at Trinidad who pulled out all of the stops to ensure that everyone had a great time. Pretty much every hole had some kind of host stations...there were Rum Punch stations, jumbalaya stations, slow roasted rib stations, Crown Royal stations, the list goes on and on. I really have never seen any tournament quite like it. But back to the golf...the tourney went on and we battled some minor rain and cool temperatures but we are Canadian so nobody was complaining. This tournament also had some amazing hole in one prizes to be had . This time though, it was cash prizes and our very own Benny “The BeefCat” Hebert dialled in an ace on hole 5 for a smooth $15,000!! Needless to say, our man Benny was pretty jacked up and proceeded to lead the celebrations that night at dinner and beyond. I was scheduled to fly to Winnipeg that night after the golf tournament but Ben was having none of that as we had an ace to celebrate so I quickly changed my flight like any good team mate would and stayed the night. Trinidad truly went all out for the dinner as they flew in lobster from Nova Scotia that day so that the Surf and Turf dinner they provided for everyone was as fresh as possible! What a day!

Throughout all of the texts, emails, phone calls, planning meetings etc, we were all also fully committed to our off-ice training all summer. We each have our own routines set up but a couple of times we all managed to get together with Shane Kups in Calgary who is Ben and Kevin’s trainer. Shane put together two of the toughest training sessions I’ve ever heard of and brought me to my knees on more than one occasion, literally. When I first arrived and heard that our session that day was called “Fight Gone Bad” I had a feeling we might be in trouble and that I might need the puke bucket! But then when I asked Shane to get one ready half way through the first session, he calmly replied “no worries, the puke cleans up very easily off this floor”. And that’s how they roll at the Bankers Hall Club!

As summer comes to a close and the on ice work begins, we look back at our first summer as Team Koe with great memories, satisfied that we took a lot of great steps toward our goal and very excited to have such amazing corporate partners as part of our 4 year journey. We absolutely cannot wait to get this journey started! Stay tuned to www.teamkoe.ca and follow us on twitter at @TeamKevinKoe for ongoing Team Koe news and updates. Thank you for your support.

Kevin, Marc, Brent and Ben

PS... Sorry for the lengthy first edition of the Team Koe blog. We promise to update you a little more frequently in the future so that there isn’t quite as much to cover.