Saskatoon man living the dream with spot on Nunavut’s Brier team

Imagine being a curling fan for decades and then, at the age of 65, actually getting a chance to play in a Canadian championship.

That’s what happened to Dale Kohlenberg.

Kohlenberg is from Saskatoon, and last fall he accepted an offer from his employer, the federal Department of Justice, to take a work assignment in Iqaluit, Nunavut.

He started his job in Nunavut on Oct. 31 and, after his first day of work, he went to the curling rink where club officials were having their registration and an open house.

He told staff at the rink he was interested in an annual membership and league curling, and was looking to get put on a competitive team either for seniors or masters.

“And they took my money for the membership and the league fee and they said, ‘We’ll put you on a team but we can’t guarantee just how competitive it will be. We’ll have to see how things go,’ ” Kohlenberg recalled.

Kohlenberg spent a lot of evenings and weekends at the local curling rink throwing rocks. One day he was approached by Ed MacDonald, who asked Kohlenberg if he wanted to play with a team in the Nunavut Brier playdowns just two weeks later.

“If you curl with us, I guarantee you’ll have a 33 per cent chance of qualifying for the Brier,” Kohlenberg said MacDonald — the team’s lead — told him. “There’s only three teams entered (and) one of them is our team.”

One of the team’s players had got sick and the other three players were looking for someone to take his place.

“It just never entered my mind that there’d be that opportunity,” Kohlenberg said. “I didn’t know what the level of curling competition was in Iqaluit but I assumed it was probably better than what I would be able to provide as a senior competitive curler. But it turned out that wasn’t the case.”

Kohlenberg decided to give it a go.

“A team that was made up of three other individuals whom I’d never met before, and never curled against before, went through the territorial playdowns undefeated,” he said.

Kohlenberg is playing third for Nunavut at the Brier — the Canadian men’s curling championship tournament — in Kingston, Ont. The team had yet to win a game at the Brier entering Wednesday’s action, but Kohlenberg says the players are just happy to be at the biggest show in the curling world.

“For any young man who starts curling, the dream is to get to the biggest show in the curling world, which is the Brier. And I did have that dream when I was much younger and never realized it and by the time I hit my early to mid-40s I thought that dream was long dead,” he said.

“But I guess this story tells us all that while you’re still breathing and pumping blood, your dreams are never dead.”