Their run came to an end last weekend, but what a run it was.
After seven years together, Team Jacobs as we’ve come to know it is no longer as the team announced earlier this spring that Ryan Fry would not be returning to the team next year.
Last Saturday marked the end of the road for the team in a 4-1 loss to Edmonton’s Brendan Bottcher at the Champions Cup, the final Grand Slam of Curling event of the season.
The team that spent seven years together with Brad Jacobs at skip, Fry at third, E.J. Harnden at second, and Ryan Harnden at lead, curled their final game together in the loss.
Fry is moving on to join John Epping’s Toronto-based team next season while Marc Kennedy is joining Team Jacobs next season after taking a year off from competitive curling.
As there are with teams in any sport, there were ups and downs for the Jacobs rink over their seven years together, but the ups were certainly memorable.
From an Olympic gold to a silver at the World Championship.
A Brier title.
Four Grand Slam of Curling titles.
It’s unusual for curling teams to stay together as long as the Jacobs rink did but when its four members are as close as these four were, it’s not surprising the group went through seven years of tournaments together.
Jacobs and the Harnden brothers are family. They brought in Fry and he became family as well.
These are four curlers who were not only teammates, but best friends off the ice as well.
Surely that played a role in the success of the group as well.
It was a brotherhood for them.
Four brothers coming together, taking the sport by storm and changing the way it was played.
The team has widely been considered to be one that changed how important fitness became in the sport and their emotion.
The team called it a fresh start in announcing the decision, but it certainly wasn’t an easy one.
At the end of the day, the group felt it was time for a change.
“We came together, we pretty much accomplished everything we wanted to,” Fry told TheGrandSlamOfCurling.com on Saturday. “We made an impact on the sport as a team and I couldn’t be more happy to have spent the last seven years together.”
“Any time you get to challenge yourself and have new experiences, it’s going to be something that I’m going to look forward to,” he added. “You get to grow as a player and as a man with the new guys. That’s the main thing, that’s the biggest reason for the change is just not becoming stagnant and becoming repetitive and what you do in life. It’s just going to be a new set of challenges and I’m looking forward to it.”
It’s going to be an exciting time as the group moves forward with new teams and new challenges lie ahead for all involved as they get used to new teammates, but what a run it was.