Winning skip Bill Fisher coaxes rock into place during Sunday’s Kelly Cup final. Photos 250 News

Prince George, B.C. – The Bill Fisher rink is the winner of the 88^th Kelly Cup men’s bonspiel held this weekend at the Prince George Golf and Curling Club.

In an all-Prince George final, Fisher doubled the Scott Sherba foursome 6-3 in Sunday afternoon’s final.  Fisher had advanced had advanced to the championship game with a victory over Brian Bailey of Prince George while Sherba gained his berth by defeating Tobin Senum of Kamloops.

Fisher was up one without the hammer in the tenth.  Sherba missed a raise take-out with his final rock as Fisher counted two on the button for to capture the Kelly Cup.

Alyssa Connell led her juvenile rink to victory in the Ladies bonspiel

In the Ladies bonspiel this weekend, the Alyssa Connell rink, which competes in the juvenile age group, defeated Julia Shaddick by a score of 7-to 5 in eight ends in another match-up that featured two Prince George foursomes.  Connell’s team went to the Juvenile (under 16) Provincials this year.

Thirty-three teams entered the Kelly Cup this year after the bonspiel failed to materialize in the spring of 2014.  Ron Phillips, PGGCC Curling Co-ordinator, says “when it was cancelled last year it was basically a wakeup call to the curlers that the Kelly Cup is put on by volunteers, not the club.  We could find no one to run the Kelly Cup.  So there’s a meeting at the end of the season and almost a hundred people showed up and they were just basically told that “you’ve gotta step up to the plate”, and they did.”

“Bill Lim stepped up to the Kelly Cup and made it happen.  He and his committee put it all together and I can guarantee you that going forward, the Kelly Cup will be successful as long as people are willing to put in the work to make it so.”

Phillips says the organizers got an added pleasant surprise this year.  “We combined it with the Ladies bonspiel this year and that was extremely successful.  It had never been done before.  They only had eight teams in their Ladies’ last year and they were at 20 teams this year.  A very healthy bonspiel, ya.”

Phillips believes the men’s and women’s spiels will be held simultaneously into the future.  He says “if one or the other gets two big we may have a problem playing them off so they may have to separate.  But I’m thinking that we’ve got a long ways to go to get back to that, if it’s possible.  I’m thinking that we’re going to have the combined bonspiels into the foreseeable future.”

He cites the success of this year’s events “and just the liveliness around the club was back to the old days.  The turnout was good and the party went every night till 3 a.m.  We were allowed to keep the bar open till 3 a.m. and it was closed down at 3 a.m. Friday and Saturday night.  It was a lot of fun.”