Many of Canada’s top shuffleboard players were in Innisfail last week competing in the Second Inter-Provincial Floor Shuffleboard Tournament – and the local team came up on top.
The Alberta Host Team from Innisfail won the seven team round robin event, which began Aug 3 at the Innisfail Curling Club and concluded three days later on Aug. 6.
Ontario and the Alberta Provincial Team were the runner-up squads in the tournament.
This year’s tournament featured 56 players from five provinces – British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario. Each team was allowed eight players with Ontario and Alberta having two teams. Each teams played with four men and four ladies.
The teams played 12 games during the round-robin tournament with the winners established on Saturday.
Max Tate, past president of the Canadian National Shuffleboard Association, said Innisfail was a good venue for the national competition as it is “hot spot” for the sport, which is growing in popularity across the province and Canada.
He said Alberta and Ontario are the provinces where the sport is most popular in Canada. Alberta has about 150 competitive players with most coming from Innisfail and High River. Ontario has about 300 competitive players.
“It is going very well in Alberta,” said Tate, who has played the game in many parts of the world over the past 15 years. “There are a lot of good people involved. It takes leadership.”
And he said the sport continues to grow internationally with a strong presence in the states of Florida, Texas, Arizona and California, along with increasing popularity in Brazil, Australia, Germany and Japan.
Tate said when he has played in the United States players there commented on how quick Canadians took to the game.
“Folks there would come up and say, ‘How come you get so good at this?,” he said. “And I would say, ‘It’s because we have curling.’
“The strategy is very similar,” he added.
He said because the game has grown so much in recent years in North America a group of 48 players went to England in 2004 to reintroduce the game, where it was founded and played by royalty about 500 years ago.
“It had died out there and so we went to bring it back in England,” said Tate.
