Joshua Miki is a chip off the curling rock, who himself is a chip off the curling rock.
A third generation of the Miki family is starting to make shavings on the curling sheet.
Joshua, 16, is following his dad, former world champion Bryan Miki, to the hog line. Bryan picked up the game from his dad, Fuji, a former Canadian mixed champion.
All three Miki’s live in Port Coquitlam and curl out of the Royal City Curling Club in New Westminster. So it’s no surprise the sport is pretty much all that’s talked about around the family dinner table, or watched on the TV.
Especially now that the family’s latest curler is raising hacks at championship bonspiels. Joshua was the second on Dawson Ballard’s Royal City/Coquitlam Curling Club team qualified for the U18 provinicials by winning their qualifier in Mill Bay recently. In December, the team lost a 3-1 nailbiter to skip Tyler Tardi’s team from Langley/Royal City in the final of the 2018 Boston Pizza BC Junior Men’s U21 Curling Championships in Langley.
They’re coached by Joshua’s dad, which has its good points and bad points for both generations of Miki’s.
“You hear different perspectives and tactics,” Joshua said of having a coach who’s also his dad. “But sometimes if you have a rough game you don’t want to hear it.”
“Once a parent, always a parent,” said Bryan, whose Burnaby roots recently led to his naming to the Burnaby Sports Hall of Fame where he’ll be formally inducted on Feb. 22. “There are times I have to bite my tongue.”
With all the time the family spent at curling rinks, it was perhaps inevitable Joshua picked up the broom as well when he was 10 years old in the Little Rocks program at RCCC.
That’s about the same age his dad started playing.
Bryan said his ascent to competitive curling took longer as there were a lot more young people playing the sport back in his day. Joshua said now it’s a challenge to muster interest to form a team at his school, Riverside secondary.
But the more he curls, the more he loves it.
“It doesn’t feel like work,” Joshua said.
Even when nerves threaten to get the better of him, as Joshua said almost happened curling against older, more experienced competition at the junior provincials. That’s when the experience of his dad was invaluable, passing down the lessons he learned at the national and international level on things like game preparation, sleeping, managing travel and practice time and decision making.
“I’ve made so many mistakes,” Bryan said. “I compress 30 years of experience into a short period of time.”
As Joshua’s confidence grows, Bryan knows his voice as his coach will diminish and he can put his dad hat back on.
“You coach them, you teach them and hopefully they’ll be good kids,” he said. “It’s like life.”
