From the ice, to the gridiron, to the pool and past, 2024 was a historic yr for a number of Saskatchewan groups and dozens extra athletes who gave their all to realize victory.
With the calendar flipping over to 2025, right here’s a take a look at 5 of the highest sports activities tales from athletes spanning all corners of the province.
Moose Jaw Warriors win historic first WHL championship
When the Winnipeg Warriors moved to town of Moose Jaw in 1984, few may have predicted a championship drought for the group that will final 4 a long time.
That streak lastly got here to an finish on Might 15, 2024 on the Moose Jaw Occasions Centre with the host Warriors defeating the Portland Winterhawks 4-2 to finish a sweep of the WHL Championship Sequence to win the franchise’s first Ed Chynoweth Cup.
“This was our aim from Day 1,” graduating ahead Atley Calvert mentioned on the ice post-game. “I knew it was going to be a particular yr, we had a particular group and we’re going to be brothers ceaselessly.”
Incomes sequence wins over the Brandon Wheat Kings and Swift Present Broncos to start playoffs, the Warriors have been matched up towards the Saskatoon Blades within the Jap Convention closing, which might go down as one of the vital exceptional sequence in WHL historical past.
With six of seven video games requiring time beyond regulation, Moose Jaw would find yourself the victor in Recreation 7 time beyond regulation with a Lynden Lakovic sequence winner to ship the Warriors by to the WHL finals.
What adopted was a medical effort by the Warriors towards Portland to seal a historic first championship. Whereas they’d be eradicated within the semifinal of the Memorial Cup, it was a season that can go down as probably the most memorable for followers within the Pleasant Metropolis.
“That is unbelievable,” Warriors head coach Mark O’Leary mentioned after the ultimate buzzer versus the Winterhawks. “I simply love this group, all the things that they’re about. Even once I’m mad at them I like them. To have the chance to do that at house is simply so particular.”
Saskatchewan Roughriders return to relevancy
On the sphere, the Saskatchewan Roughriders made good on their promise to return to the CFL‘s playoffs after two straight years sitting on the sidelines.
With first-year head coach Corey Mace on the helm, the Roughriders endured an up-and-down common season, which included a 5-1 file out of the gate and a seven-game winless streak by the center of the season.
Ending the yr with a 9-8-1 file, Saskatchewan earned the second seed within the West Division and hosted its first playoff recreation since 2021, which noticed the Riders come away with a 28-19 victory over the BC Lions.
The Roughriders would fall the next week to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers 38-22 within the West Division Remaining, seeing their season finish one win shy of enjoying for a Gray Cup.
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“It’s very thrilling to know the soundness of the inspiration that’s been set in place within the first yr,” Mace mentioned the day after their playoff elimination.
Saskatchewan’s largest query mark heading into the low season was answered in early December, with 38-year-old quarterback Trevor Harris signing a one-year contract extension to return for a 3rd season in inexperienced and white.
“It was a no brainer for me,” Harris mentioned in a December media availability. “As quickly as I knew that I felt like I had a number of years left within the tank, that is the place I wish to be.”
Medal haul for Saskatchewan athletes at Olympics and Paralympics
Throughout the ocean, just a few dozen athletes from Saskatchewan acquired to reside out their goals in Paris competing on the 2024 Olympics and Paralympics for Staff Canada.
In whole, 5 medals have been introduced again to Saskatchewan, with Waldheim native Carissa Norsten successful silver alongside Canada’s nationwide girls’s rugby sevens workforce as a part of a magical run to the gold medal recreation, the place they fell 19-12 to New Zealand.
On the Paralympics, Midale bicycle owner Keely Shaw claimed her second profession Paralympic bronze medal within the girls’s 3,000-metre C4 particular person pursuit to seize Canada’s third medal of the Video games.
That was adopted by successive bronze medals on the volleyball court docket and within the pool, with Melfort’s Julie Kozun and Saskatoon’s Shelby Newkirk reaching the rostrum with Canada’s girls’s sitting volleyball workforce and within the girls’s 100-metre S6 backstroke.
In the meantime, Pike Lake product Rylan Wiens and his associate Nathan Zsombor-Murray introduced Canada a bronze medal in males’s 10-metre synchronized diving.
“Positively nervous the entire time from begin to end,” Wiens mentioned in International studios after his return house. “Particularly after we began to appreciate that we had an actual shot at it later within the competitors, however we each held our composure and I used to be in a position to do my dives actually good within the second.”
Wiens’ win was a historic one for the Canadian workforce, bringing house Canada’s first-ever medal within the occasion.
“It’s a fairly superb feeling being the primary and type of making Canadian historical past,” Wiens mentioned. “To have the ability to convey a medal house from the Olympics is a fairly surreal expertise.”
Saskatchewan quartet launch inaugural PWHL season
Girls’s hockey took a long-awaited step ahead in 2024 with the launch of the Skilled Girls’s Hockey League on New 12 months’s Day, lastly offering a secure league for the most effective skilled feminine athletes on this planet.
Saskatoon native and Olympic gold medalist Emily Clark was one of many first signings to Ottawa’s PWHL franchise, now often known as the Ottawa Cost, whereas fellow Saskatoon AAA Stars alumni Sophie Shirley and Prince Albert product Brooke Hobson have been drafted by the Boston Fleet and New York Sirens, respectively.
A fourth Saskatchewan lady in Prince Albert’s Kaitlin Willoughby was additionally in a position to break into the league with the Toronto Scepters as a free agent signing, a feat she replicated forward of the 2024-25 PWHL season.
A further honour was bestowed on Clark and Shirley, because the pair have been named to Staff Canada’s roster for the 2024 Rivalry Sequence towards the US, with a pair of video games performed in February in Saskatoon and Regina.
“I do know first-hand all it takes is just a few seconds and an autograph and it will probably gas a dream for a lifetime,” Clark mentioned. “I’m actually proud that my neighborhood acquired to expertise that right now.”
For Shirley, it was her debut with the nationwide girls’s senior workforce, getting the chance to hit the ice sporting the maple leaf in entrance of family and friends.
“Rising up on this space, (I used to be) in a position to put myself of their sneakers like I used to be at one level,” Shirley mentioned. “To now be on the ice and be at this stage is a fairly cool feeling for me.”
Staff McEwen makes magical run at Regina Brier
The Brandt Centre in Regina was house to curling’s largest social gathering in March and a run that despatched followers throughout the province into hysterics.
Internet hosting the 2024 Montana’s Brier, the hometown crowd was handled to a memorable efficiency out of the Staff Saskatchewan rink, consisting of skip Mike McEwen, third Colton Flasch and twin brothers Kevin and Dan Marsh.
Staff McEwen completed high of its pool within the round-robin and performed its option to the Brier closing, the place it aimed to finish Saskatchewan’s 44-year championship drought relationship again to Rick People’s win in 1980.
The clock struck midnight on the home-province rink, nonetheless, as Saskatchewan fell to Brad Gushue’s Staff Canada rink 9-5, giving Gushue his record-breaking sixth Brier title.
“Actually being accepted by the province, that was one thing that was very particular and I’ll keep in mind,” McEwen mentioned, recapping his yr. “That can be one of many very huge highlights of my total profession.”
Following its run on the Brier, Staff McEwen was in a position to preserve that momentum rolling with a number of semifinal appearances on the Grand Slam of Curling tour and a event victory on the 2024 PointsBet Invitational in Calgary.
“To see what was occurring in entrance of me with the Marsh brothers and with Colton Flasch was very thrilling about opening up doorways and what’s truly nonetheless probably enjoying at extra of the tail finish of my profession,” McEwen mentioned.
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