MOOSEJAWTODAY.COM -- As Team Saskatchewan 1 celebrated their Canadian Wheelchair Curling Championship national title at the Moose Jaw Events Centre on Saturday afternoon, one overarching theme was a part of each interview.
“We did this for Lorraine.”
Saskatchewan 1 head coach Lorraine Arguin had revealed early in the preparation process that this would be her final run as a coach for the provincial team program after being part of it all since 2008, and with that, Sask 1 had an extra component to their gold-medal mission.
So when things wrapped up on Saturday afternoon with a repeat championship on home ice, everyone made a point of saying just how much Arguin had meant to their success.
“Coach Lorraine Arguin, she’s been with us for years,” said skip Gil Dash, who alongside third Marie Wright and Arguin now have five national titles to their credit. “She’s the reason we’re here and Lorraine is the reason I have five, and she’s the reason there’s wheelchair curling in Saskatchewan, pretty much. So I want to say hat’s off to her, this is her retirement victory party.”
Third Moose Gibson is a four-time national champion and made a direct and specific comment during a post-game interview with Curling Canada’s Lisa Weagle.
“I’m going to speak right into the Curl Canada mic,” he said, leaning closer to Weagle’s recorder. “She’s the best wheelchair coach in Canada, bar none, period.”
Wright has worked with Arguin the vast majority of her wheelchair curling career and carried a similar sentiment.
“Today we did it for our coach, Lorraine.” she said. “She’s the best coach in the world. She’s retiring after this year and we’re going to miss her a lot. We did it for her.”
Pederson won her first title and thanked Arguin for helping her reach the point where she was capable of helping win a gold medal.
“Lorraine started it all for me about eight years ago when I first tried this out,” Pederson said. “She kept me going, you could easily fall off the tracks, but she kept me going just like the great coach she is.”
For her part, Arguin feels it’s simply time to move on after a decade and a half of dedication to the sport and naturally became a bit emotional when asked about the team, admitting she’d miss her teammates.
“You have to make a decision at some point, and I have so many other things I need to be doing,” Arguin said. “They’ll be fine, I don’t even know what will happen next year, we’ll worry about that after we have some meetings and figure out what the plan is.”
