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Player-coach relationship: Kevin Martin & Jules Owchar
STORY BY
ALLEN CAMERON
The most successful player-coach relationship in the history of curling started in fall 1984 when Kevin Martin, a kid with shaggy blonde hair, showed up at the office of Jules Owchar, asking to play for NAIT. A few practices later, a partnership was born that remains solid a quarter-century later.
It's a late 1983 winter day in Edmonton, and NAIT curling coach Jules Owchar is in his customary position behind the glass of a sheet of curling ice. He's coaching one of his star players, Rick Feeney, in the Northern Alberta junior men's playdowns when he notices another junior a few sheets over. The kid, Kevin Martin, had an athletic build even then, and a shaggy mop of blonde hair. Owchar watched the kid throw a few shots, and followed his name for the rest of the playdowns, but never saw him throw another rock.
Fast forward to the following September and the same kid is in Owchar's office, expressing his interesting in curling for Owchar's famed NAIT program. A few practices later, Martin is skipping the Ooks men's team, and a partnership is born that, a quarter-century later, is beyond question the most successful coach-player relationship in curling history.
A long history together
A junior national championship, four Brier titles, a world title, an Olympic silver medal and more cashpiel winnings than any player in history, with the greatest prize - gold at February's Winter Olympics in Vancouver - still hanging tantalizingly within reach; to say the least, it's been an enriching 25 years for both men.
Owchar, who spent 34 years at NAIT teaching phys ed before retiring in 2003, knew early on that Martin was destined for greatness. Sure, he threw the rock well. Nothing amazing there: lots of juniors are great throwers.
But Martin, a 1987 graduate of Petroleum Engineering Technology who makes no secret of the fact that he went to NAIT specifically because of Owchar, had something intangible that was put on display in 1985 when he skipped Feeney, Dan Petryk and Mike Berger to a national junior championship in the team's first year together.
"You see a lot of juniors and they all look so good. But they just stay there," says Owchar, who was inducted into the NAIT Athletics Wall of Fame the year he retired, and still coaches the school's curling and golf teams. "Kevin was good, but as he went through cities, northerns and provincials, you could see as he was making shots that he was just not an ordinary curler. And he did the same thing in the nationals and the worlds." In the 1986 world junior championship, Martin's rink was undefeated until the final, losing to Scotland.
