The province's best junior curlers will be training in Morris this upcoming season.

Curl Manitoba has selected the Morris Curling Club as the host site for the “NextGen” Program, a team-based high performance-training program for junior teams and coaches in Manitoba.

Morris executive member Lorne Hamblin says junior curling is really taking off, noting they trained about 170 school kids last winter at the club.

lorne hamblin
Lorne Hamblin, Morris Curling Club Executive Member

This new advanced program is open to 12 teams and will run for 19 weeks starting in mid-October.

Hamblin notes representatives from Morris met with Curl Manitoba before Christmas to discuss the possibility of putting in a training centre similar to what is in the Saville Centre in Edmonton, which is the national training centre for curling.

“We're going to put in about $15,000 - $20,000 worth of electrical equipment, video analysis, that kind of stuff, big TV's. A picture's worth a thousand words when you're teaching,” he said.

The eventual goal is to expand the program beyond junior curlers to include teams from Manitoba, Canada, and the world.

Hamblin notes the new training centre will also be used for other sports besides curling.

“That's the exciting part,” he said. “Because we're going wireless; we're going into multi-media so that we ourselves are going to have laptops, we'll have video cameras, we'll have iPads. Coaches that are on the baseball diamond, that are on the golf course, that are in the swimming pool. If they want to video their athletes then we have the equipment.”

The Morris Curling Club is also looking at completing upgrades to the ice-plant, which would allow the facility to operate 10 months during the year. Hamblin estimates the cost of this project could be in the range of $140,000. He says private funding would be required for this initiative, adding they have also requested a meeting with Premier Brian Pallister and Morris MLA Shannon Martin.

curling edmonton courtesy lorne hamblin
Chris Hamblin (right) at the Saville Training Centre in Edmonton - Courtesy Lorne Hamblin