Skip with Sault ties wins world senior curling championships

A former Sault Ste. Marie resident and Lakeway graduate has landed on top of the senior curling world.

At 61 years of age, Howard Rajala and his team from the Rideau Curling Club in Ottawa recently returned to Canada after representing the nation and winning the World Senior Curling Championships last week in Gangneung, South Korea.

“It’s unbelievable — I never would have thought I would have the opportunity to be at a world curling championship,” he says.

Born and raised in the Sault, Rajala was a Grade 9 student when he discovered his passion for curling on Lakeway’s high school team in 1975.

“I remember starting curling, and Al Harnden was our first coach and helped us learn the game and strategy,” he says. “I loved it as soon as I tried it. There’s a lot of skill, strategy, and fun involved in the game, so it really intrigued me.”

“We had a big league of high school curling, which was great. I remember going to the rink at the Soo Curlers Club right after school, either throwing rocks for practice or playing a game in our high school league. It was so much fun, and I met a lot of people there.”

Although he hasn’t been back in the Sault for a little over a decade, Rajala has lots of fond memories from growing up in the area — no matter the time of year.

“We had a camp about 20 minutes from our door in Trout Lake, which was fantastic in the summertime,” he says. “It was nice for the summer holidays to be out there. At the time, I didn’t necessarily appreciate having a camp so close to where you live.”

“I miss the winters there, too. I really enjoyed them, even with how cold it was and how much snow we got. Lots of good Italian restaurants in the area, too.”

After graduating from Lakeway in 1980, Rajala attended the University of Waterloo, where he curled a little bit on the side while most of his focus was directed towards earning his degree in mechanical engineering.

He eventually moved to Ottawa and spent his career working in the telecom industry up until 2022.

But over the years, the Sault native always made sure to find some time to hit the ice.

“In 1992, I joined up with Rich Moffat, who at the time was one of the best curlers in Ottawa,” he says. “We started to enter the higher-level bonspiels and we even travelled across the country to go into various bonspiels.”

“At that time, there was no thought about being professional or quitting a job or anything. We were full-time working and trying to squeeze in all these bonspiels and taking a lot of vacation days dedicated to curling.”

A highlight of Rajala’s curling career came in 1999 when he represented Ontario at the Brier in Edmonton alongside Moffat, Chris Fulton, and Paul Madden. They finished the tournament with a record of 6-5.

Twenty-four years later, that same foursome has stuck by each other and remained competitive within the senior levels of international curling.

Before his team was competing for the world title in South Korea, Rajala exorcised some demons at the national championships in Nova Scotia last December to qualify for the global stage.

“We had been to two previous Canadian Senior Championships and lost the final both times, so it was quite satisfying to win in our third final,” he says. “Just having been there before, we felt quite calm. It was fantastic to finally win a Canadian championship, and just knowing that we’d be wearing the maple leaf on our back was something you dream about.”

Up against 23 other countries on the world’s biggest senior curling stage, Team Rajala went 6-1 in their round robin to finish second in their group.

From there, his squad made the playoff matches look easy, beating Ireland 9-1 in the quarterfinal, topping the U.S. 8-2 in the semis, and then claiming the championship over Scotland with a 7-2 win in the final last week.

“It was really nice in our last three games,” he says. “We probably played our best three games in those last three for sure.”

“That winning moment is right up there with our appearance at the Brier and our Canadian championship title.”

To this day, Rajala still keeps in touch with some of the curlers he grew up playing with from the Sault, and he even runs into them from time to time.

“We’ve bumped into Al Harnden and played against them once or twice,” he says. “It’s always fun to play against the Sault boys.”